Fragmented Recordings drive - lesson learned.

[morser]

I knew there was something I forgot to set...

My system was running great for months...
I'm not compressing any recordings.
When recording 2 or 3 shows at once I started getting choppy playbacks during while the machine was recording other programs...

Over 90% of the 1TB drive was fragmented. Even with a SATA-300 the impact of fragments was hitting hard.

Defragged the drive, and set a schedule to do it during wee morning hours (3rd party defrager), and the performance went back to normal.

Lesson learned.

[bgowland]

Defragged the drive, and set a schedule to do it during wee morning hours (3rd party defrager), and the performance went back to normal.

Which defragger did you use?. I'm getting jumps in recordings which I think may be as a result of a combination of things but suspect fragmentation may contribute.

Cheers,
Brian

[mmatheny]

Use contig.exe - it's easy to script and can run silently.

[morser]

I bought O&O (that's "oh and oh"), but Diskkeeper is good too.
contig.exe works too.
Doesn't really matter.
If you have vista, the built in defrag can be basically scheduled.

Reason I posted this is because I had quite a few configuration tweaks to get GBPVR running smooth on my system, but sometimes they are as simple as this.

[zehd]

I'm getting jumps in recordings which I think may be as a result of a combination of things but suspect fragmentation may contribute.

Cheers,
Brian

While I know the effects of fragmentation can be stuttering, I've noticed that when I'm recording a couple of shows at once and laying back either a recorded mpg or non mpg, one or both of the new recordings have some stuttering right in the recording itself. Sort of like the timestamp issue.

But then that's my own fault... It's a sub standard system, and I'm pushing it too hard. It's all good if I leave it alone to record.... I can MVP or PC client a playback and just fine. Probably something to do with the CPU use during playback...

It also doesn't help that I keep testing my new versions of software on my production machine (I AM NOT TAKING THE BLAME ON THAT ONE --- DAYS ARE JUST TOO DAMN SHORT!)

What I have done to get around my shortcomings, is in postprocessing, I have VideoRedo Retime the video, which is so incredibly fast and easy on the CPU and drive that I don't have a problem. And my drive is constantly fragged....

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!!!

[pcostanza]

I'm trialing O&O and it is good but Auslogics has a free version that is also pretty good if anyone wants to try it out. It runs pretty smooth for me in both XP and Vista.

[martint123]

The Free JKDefrag does it for me - very configurable. works for me.

http://www.kessels.biz/JkDefrag/index.html

[SLR_65]

Hmmm, I haven't noticed this yet but my 750gb only runs about half full most of the time.

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.

I'm wondering how much of a problem this is and if it affects commercial DVRs and how they deal with it.

Would the answer be running some sort of cache?

[HarryH3]

For some reason, the XP defragger often refuses to defrag the video files in my GBPVR folder. However, contig.exe does a fine job.

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

[athomas]

Even on my 500 Gig SATA drive that is only half full, I make sure it stays defragmented. I can usually tell when it gets fragmented. Performance goes down, even if it is only half full.


I use Auslogic. It works pretty good.