I have a hard drive that I use for storing and working with large tar
archives, ranging from less than one MB to hundreds of MB and I have
thousands of these archives. It is not convenient to format this drive and
start over often, which I do about once every 6 months due to the problem I
have. It seems that after a few months of working with these archives,
unpacking, making modifications and tarring them back up, the whole system
will get very slow, but particularly this drive. Since I cannot find any
defrag programs, I'm not really sure what to do other than completely wipe
the drive and restore the archives.

Currently, this is an ext4 partition. I do not believe this ever happened
with an ext3 partition, but it may have and I've just forgotten.

Are there any tools I can use to clean up an ext4 partition and recover some
speed? Am I missing a defrag tool somewhere?

All my googling is only returning how to recover corrupt partitions and
such, but my partitions are not corrupt, that I know of, just slow.

Nathan