F16 unusable while writing to pendrive

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2011-12-17 at 21:15 -0800, sourcerer_sea at riseup.net wrote:
> > Actually, the fact that Linux drives don't need regular defragging has
> > nothing to do with the file system.

> It should still be possible to fragment a large file if, for example, you
> opened a file that covered more than 3 segments and appended data to the
> middle of it.

You can't "append to the middle of it". Appending by definition means
adding on the end. You can overwrite the middle, but it's not going to
push everything up to make room (i.e. filesystems don't work like text
editors where you can 'insert' stuff just anywhere).

The only way this would be relevant to extent allocation is in the case
of sparse files, where the file has a certain logical size but a lower
physical size. If you don't know what I mean by that, kindly read up on
sparse files before proceeding.

poc