Re: De Frag...Should I or shouldn't I ?????

["Bob Maple" <bobm-ds(at)burner.com>]

Here is my method:

I do NOT obsessively defrag (nightly, or even weekly).  I defrag my video 
drives once every month or so (sometimes even less) but only when I get down 
a point where I have very few projects online and the video drives are 
relatively empty as possible (75% free space or more).

NTFS is a pretty crappy filesystem, and will start fragmenting almost 
immediately even on a clean drive.. it's pretty much impossible to keep it 
looking perfect all the time, and you don't necessarily want it that way 
anyway.  But when you've been turning over a LOT of data for a long period 
of time, eventually you're left with tons of tiny little holes scattered all 
over the place, with few contiguous stretches of empty blocks to write to - 
so when you capture something new, the media is being busted up into tons of 
tiny little pieces which can kill performance.  Thats when you run into 
dropped frames, if the drives are having to crazily seek all over the place 
just to read/write a small amount of data.

What AVID is saying is that you don't need to really deal with it until you 
actually have a problem, and that defragging nightly or weekly (or 
obsessively in general) is usually just a waste of time because even with 
fragmentation, you probably weren't really having a performance issue in the 
first place.  Thats why they suggest only defragging individual files on an 
as-needed basis if you start dropping frames.

In SD, I've _never_ had a dropped frame that I can blame on fragmentation. 
In uncompressed HD, drive performance is obviously a much bigger issue, and 
you're likely to see it more often.


|  Bob Maple  |  bobm_at_burner_dot_com  |  [http] burner.com
|
|  Thom Yorke: "Here's to getting hitched, Space Ghost."
|  SG: "Yeah..  Lets drink until our hearts stop."

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