Fragmentation

[apelly]

There are some threads here, and a plethora of them on the rest of the net, all of which are inconclusive.

I have 2xdvb-s cards and on a regular basis I have to copy all recorded TV from one drive to another to get the fragmentation down to a level where it doesn't interfere with playback. Currently my most fragged show has over 35000 pieces and plays like a one handed juggler on P; OK for a bit, then some frantic bounding around to collect the pieces and start again.

Has anyone found a satisfactory work around for this? I was thinking of setting aside a temp partition with a few G to record to, then a batch file to copy it where it should end up.

I thought I'd ask around though to save re-slicing the loaf.

[martint123]

As soon as you start deleting shows from a drive and copying shows to them you will get fragments no matter if you copy to the drive or record to the drive. I just let o&o defrag run once in a while.
I've never had a problem with playback unless really heavy activity such as a backup is happening at the same time. I have a separate physical drive for recordings and the rest of windows which might help?

[psycik]

I'm similar to martin123, separate windows and recordings drives (not just partitions). And i think I have a windows defrag set for each week.....but ive never noticed any issues.

[apelly]

Sorry guys. I had a corrupt recording.

Now I think about it, your hard drive would have to be in pretty bad shape not to be able to deliver 500k or so per second to keep your playback happy. Even recording 2 shows and watching another shouldn't be too much of a strain.

It does still significantly slow down moving files though. I guess that's just a reason for some sort of LVM

[HarryH3]

For some reason, Windows defrag (in XP with SP3) doesn't improve fragmentation on most of the files in my recordings directory. However, if you search the Microsoft website for "contig.exe", an excellent program from Sysinternals, it does an excellent job of defragging the recordings directory.

I open a cmd window and enter "contig f:\gb-pvr\*.* -s" and let it do its thing.

[Paul Shirley]

I'd suggest JkDefrag, probably the best free Win32 defrag tool around and able to defrag files as well as whole drives.