Fragmented Recordings drive - lesson learned.

[bgowland]

I don't want to ruffle feathers, but I feel that IN MOST CASES, using a file defragger, file per file is sort of like Monster cables. Yeah, maybe an oscilliscope can see the difference, but never worth the money or time or concern or time...

There... I said it... Let me have it!!!

I agree up to a point - certainly when it comes to Monster cables :p

Then again, I've just run contig on a few folders on my recording drive. Fragmentation per file has so far ranged from 1, 14, 25 fragments to 3000+, 4000+, 5000+.

We use our GB-PVR system mostly as a daily video recorder and, in the 4 years since I built it, I think I've only attempted to defrag the recording drive once or twice. It seems to me that with multiple tuners, simultaneous recordings will always be fragmented as the files are written around each other (so to speak).

Viewing habits vary - sometimes we watch and delete straight away and sometimes we keep a recording for a while. Deleting one of three, say, simultaneous recordings will leave fragmented free space of an unspecified pattern - two of three, yet another unspecified pattern. Three simultaneous recordings the next day may potentially use the free fragmented space in a fragmented way thus fragmenting the fragments and so on...

I too use my GB-PVR machine for software development and testing - this often coincides with my wife watching something on the MVP downstairs at the same time as there are simultaneous recordings in progress. I have no doubt that some of the glitches I see in recordings or my wife sees in playback are as a result of me pushing my system at the wrong time.

I've been disabling a number of unnecessary services, cutting down on background apps and various other things today. It seems to me that scripted/automated defrags won't hurt.

Cheers,
Brian

[bgowland]

I have a couple Polaroid DRM-2001G DVRs that have 80gb hard drives in them and both have ran over two years with no issues and there's no option in it to defrag the drives, unless it's doing it transparently.

Entirely possible that there's in-built defragging although most developers of devices like this don't think that far ahead.

How many tuners do those devices have? A single tuner and only recording one thing at a time may potentially mean slower fragmentation.

Back in the good old days I recall getting error messages from VMS about fragmentation causing problems. Gawd, I'm old! :o

Yep you're old. Not that I even know what VMS was....and I've never even heard of a PDP11 or a VAX 11/780.

[martint123]

I have a couple Polaroid DRM-2001G DVRs that have 80gb hard drives in them and both have ran over two years with no issues and there's no option in it to defrag the drives, unless it's doing it transparently.

They often use a dedicated filesystem that doesn't need the flexibility of fat32/ntfs. ISTR some (or all?) of the linux/unix filesystems don't suffer to the same extent as Windows (my HPMediavault used ReiserFS and says it doesn't need defragging).

[morser]

Anyone remember ndd.exe for dos? What did the letters stand for

[mmatheny]

Norton Disk Doctor.

[systemshark]

Winternals defrag 3 works lovely too.......

[martint123]

Anyone remember ndd.exe for dos? What did the letters stand for

As mentioned Disc Doctor. Although the early versions were almost guaranteed to totally destroy drives larger than 32Mb (as I know to my cost).


Although I think defrag was another program within the Norton package.

[SLR_65]

Hmmm, I currently run 3 tuners and often record a couple programs at the same time. So far no issues I can recall, but I'll keep a closer eye out now.

Defragging large discs could take a while. Again, I'm wondering if some sort of large disc read cache wouldn't be in order? Memory is pretty cheap these days.

The Polaroids only have one tuner and they do use a proprietary disc format (though you can use a regular pc drive in them, they'll just format it when you install the drive and fire it up), so that's probably why they don't have an issue with this.

[systemshark]

Although I think defrag was another program within the Norton package.

wasn't it called SpeedDisk.exe ??

[mmatheny]

Correctomundo!