How to Avoid Heavy Fragmentation

[martint123]

Beg to differ, but the block size seems to make a lot of difference. I currently have three tuners and quite often two or more are running.

[Bathman]

SageTV used to recommend (and may still do - its been many a year since I frequented their forums) formating your hard drive in 64bit clusters to reduce fragmentation. Does this help?

[Anthony]

I use Perfect Disk also (defragging my system disk every night and a second data drive I use for photos and videos I created once a week) but it takes a very long time to push around 500GB of multi-gigabyte files when it runs. Like I said, it takes around 20 hours to defrag the disk so defragging nightly is out of the question.

The drive doesn't necessarily have to be completely defragmented with each pass. Unless you're changing all 500GB of data every day, the majority of the files will remain unchanged from one defragment session to the next. So multiple runs will accumulate to keep your drive mostly defragmented. At least, this works with Perfect Disk, since it moves the oldest files to the start of the disk, where they will remain until you edit or delete them.

All Perfect Disk needs to move are the files you have added, edited, or deleted that day. That's normally WAY less than 500GB.

I have Comskip and VideoRedo processing video files between 11pm and 2am, so I only have Perfect Disk run between 2am and 6am (about 4 hours). Most of the time, it has finished processing both of my 250gig hard drives long before I get up in the morning.

Out of curiosity, I just ran a manual scan to see what my current drive state looked like, and both drives are fully defragmented.

Anthony

[LewE]

The drive doesn't necessarily have to be completely defragmented with each pass. Unless you're changing all 500GB of data every day, the majority of the files will remain unchanged from one defragment session to the next. So multiple runs will accumulate to keep your drive mostly defragmented. At least, this works with Perfect Disk, since it moves the oldest files to the start of the disk, where they will remain until you edit or delete them.

Thanks for the clarification. I assume you are using SmartPlacement for the type of defrag. Because fragmentation wasn't a problem before I never ran a defrag on the disk until I added the second tuner.

I agree that most of the files are from old programs and if subsequent SmartPlacement defrags will only affect the newer file then that would be the best solution for me. I will try doing another defrag and see how long it takes.

[zehd]

I do not want to upset anyone but I want to ask:

(I'm smiling while I say this... )

Why the hell are people so worried about fragmentation? I used to be a tweaker. Tweaked my machine to no ends. Got monster cables, and the very latest running shoes so I could run faster.

Tried a billion defrag apps, some said they were better than others.

Since XP and NTFS, I've never had a system slowdown that is attributable to a fragged drive. I do have two (or three) tuners, and yes MS defrag says the drive is heavily fragged, but I don't see the problem.... I used to defrag cause I was obsessive.

Anyway, I'm simply asking, do you folks actually see (not read from stats) improvement when you defrag?

Thanks...

Serious question here....

[wtg]

I just evaluated PerfectDisk on a heavily fragmented drive that was also near full... just 8 GB left out of 300 GB. It was pretty darn slow, taking 10 hours, but like O&O Defrag it did an excellent job. I can't really say how long O&O Defrag would have taken in this case though.

I've run other defraggers in the past, Windows built-in and others, and found they did a very poor job with a disk near full with predominantly all large files. Often the drive would be still quite fragmented afterwards and the freespace wouldn't be consolidated. PerfectDisk did a really good job, and I must say I'm a bit on the fence about which one to buy now. Thanks for the recommendation!

[martint123]

Why the hell are people so worried about fragmentation?

I've suffered what seems to be dropped data writes when recording two shows and at the same time as a backup was happening (no, I didn't plan it that way). I heard the disk thrashing around, which with later tests along with defrags didn't seem to happen.

I must admit, defrags only done every month or so and often not using a defrag utility, but a test restore from backups - that seems to tidy thngs up quite well.

[Deusxmachina]

Anyway, I'm simply asking, do you folks actually see (not read from stats) improvement when you defrag?

When I was using a 120gb drive for Windows AND HD recordings, defragmenting once in awhile seemed mandatory. Things had a higher chance of stuttering, especially when doing more than one thing at a time. The bigger the drive, the longer you can get away with not doing it.

[zehd]

I have one OS drive and a large TV drive, Two tuners. I am interested, because I really haven't noticed a problem, but having contiguous TV shows makes sense....

I just don't need one more thing to be paranoid about... :eek:

[stustunz]

yeah i want some real proof aswell
martin a clicking drive to me noramlly means its about to die so good luck on that