I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
Details
- External ID
- 49438865
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I missed the moving blocks, so I built a real Linux disk defragmenter
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Aug. 25, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 97
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.926747311827957
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 10, 2026, 5:32 a.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- linux disk defragmenter
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building a real Linux disk defragmenter requires kernel-level file system ioctls (such as FIBMAP/FIEMAP and FS_IOC_MOVE_EXT), root filesystem safety guarantees, and deep OS storage internals.
What it would actually take: The program must interact directly with Linux filesystem ioctl calls (EXT4_IOC_MOVE_EXT) to query block layouts and safely swap extents without risking filesystem corruption. Visualizing block allocation tables in real-time requires continuous block-mapping scans alongside a TUI framework like Bubbletea or ncurses. Deep Linux storage, kernel API, and C/Go systems programming expertise is critical to avoid catastrophic data loss.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Defragmentation wastes SSD lifetime, TRIM is irrelevant to filesystem-level fragmentation issues, Full partitions create unavoidable fragmentation, Performance impact varies by NVMe granularity (4KB vs 64KB)
Feature requests: NVMe extensions for filesystem hints about block-to-file relationships, SSD controller optimization for interleaving file blocks
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 412 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 413 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 298 days after the earliest competitor.
- DiskTriage · hn · 2026-09-12 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- I Forked MinIO Object Storage and Made It Run Faster · hn · 2026-07-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- I built my site as a Windows 95 experience (2025) · hn · 2026-05-03 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- WonderBox · github · 2026-09-20 · 181 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Dockside · hn · 2026-07-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Solo · hn · 2026-08-17 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Hinode · hn · 2026-08-04 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- ember · github · 2026-09-13 · 137 upvotes · similarity 0.45
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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