DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

I don't think you've ruined the drive - I think it's just fragmented.  Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any tools available to defrag and ext2 file system, so you have to find an alternative way to do it.

Here's something you could try - copy all the files of the "degraded" drive, reformat it, and copy them back - now run whatever test you ran and see if it "saturates the fast ethernet connection" again.

Let me know how it goes

What does it mean for the future?  I wish I had an answer for that.

I half expected someone to jump on my case for suggesting that an ext2 drive could be fragmented - the generally held view is that the linux ext2 & ext3 files systems do not fragment in the same way that the Windows FAT & NTFS file systems do, and therefore do not need to be defragmented.

As a result - this is now my opinion - the necessary tools to do it have been neglected and the only way to do it, is the rather cumbersome, backup/reformat/restore process that you went through.

I'm not the best person to tell you what the options are - not being a BT user - I have limited experience with it, but, from the postings and the experiences of others like yourself, I've come to recognize that the nature of the process is to download files in fragments rather than one contiguous chunk and this apparently leads to them being stored in a fragmented nature on the disks.

It is, I suppose, possible that other BT clients may not work in this way, or, may or may not have the same problem to a greater or lesser extent - there's no reason why a BT client could not be written so that it creates a temp file where it assembles the torrent from the fragments and then copies that file elsewhere and either reuses it's fragmented "scratch area" or deletes it - so a change to a different BT client might be one option.

As you suggest having a separate small partition (the "scratch area" I describe above) could be another, but on a DNS-323 that potentially leads to other problems as the device does not really allow for custom partitioning.

I leave it to the linux gurus and the DNS-323 masters to guide you from here.

I am not using BT, and have a different type of 1TB discs, BUT I apparently have degraded drives AND I am interested in the level of defragmentation with regards to FW 1.06 which I am still having problems with.  I installed ffp 0.5, then ran telnet from a dos window.  This is the exchange 'snipped out'

/ # e2fsck -nv /dev/sda2
e2fsck 1.41.0 (10-Jul-2008)
e2fsck: Device or resource busy while trying to open /dev/sda2
Filesystem mounted or opened exclusively by another program?
/ # e2fsck -nv /dev/sdb2
e2fsck 1.41.0 (10-Jul-2008)
e2fsck: No such device or address while trying to open /dev/sdb2
Possibly non-existent or swap device?
/ #

OK, that clearly did not work.  And yes there is only one disc in this DNS-323. 
I searched and read something about needing to dismount in one article and not needing to dismount in another.  So what do I do next? 

Biscotte