I have a 900GB ext4 partition on a hard drive that has no defects and no bad sectors. The partition is completely empty except for an empty lost+found directory. The partition was formatted using default parameters except that I set the number of reserved filesystem blocks to 1%.

Why is this happening? I thought ext4 was meant to be resistant to fragmentation. Instead I find that it immediately fragments a solitary file when all the rest of the volume is unused. This seems to be worse than both FAT32 and NTFS.

I have a 900GB ext4 partition on a (magnetic) hard drive that has no defects and no bad sectors. The partition is completely empty except for an empty lost+found directory. The partition was formatted using default parameters except that I set the number of reserved filesystem blocks to 1%.

Why is this happening? And is there a way to prevent it from happening? I thought ext4 was meant to be resistant to fragmentation. Instead I find that it immediately fragments a solitary file when all the rest of the volume is unused. This seems to be worse than both FAT32 and NTFS.

I have a 900GB ext4 partition on a hard drive that has no defects and no bad sectors. The partition is completely empty except for an empty lost+found directory. The partition was formated using default parameters except that I set the number of reserved filesystem blocks to 1%.

I downloaded the ~900MB file xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso to the directory using wget. When the download was finished, I found that the file was split into four fragments:

I have a 900GB ext4 partition on a hard drive that has no defects and no bad sectors. The partition is completely empty except for an empty lost+found directory. The partition was formatted using default parameters except that I set the number of reserved filesystem blocks to 1%.

I downloaded the ~900MB file xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso to the partition's mount point directory using wget. When the download was finished, I found that the file was split into four fragments: