Defraggin Media Files - Is it safe?

E

Editor321

Active member
Is defragging your media drives safe and if so, how often??

I have heard the good and bad of doing such.

From Various Internet Sites:

Against Defraging
"Do not defrag your media drives. This will only lead to corrupt media files. Most NLE works fine with fragged files, so long as you format your drive occassionally."

Also:

For Defraging
"We are convinced from the tests we conducted as described in this report that fragmentation is one of the major culprits that impede the performance, stablility, and productivity of NLE systems. As fragmentation builds up, your system slows down and becomes more prone to crashes and freeze ups.

So......whats really going on?????
 
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I usually only defrag C drive. Defragging helps the programs access files and run faster,, not the video. Your videos and audio should be saved on a seperate drive anyway. And that drive should not need defragging since there are no executables.
 
Fragmentation has notjing to do with executables.

A typical cause (but not the only) is something like this:

1) You have a 10 MB file on disk.
2) You delete the 10MB file, leaving a 10 MB "hole" in the filesystem.
3) You save a 14 MB file...and the operating system put 10 of it in that hole you just made, and the remaining 4 somewhere else. It's now a "fragmented" file.
 
yes it does- most applications suggest you defragment your drive before installing, that way its files are not scattered about in different "holes"
 
Thanks for your replies...from what Im reading defragging your files is the way to go....

More Info:

Defragmenting your hard drives

Defragmenting a drive is an easy performance enhancer, and you should defragment regularly. You see, a hard drive is really a circular platter (kind of like a CD). Data is written onto this platter in a circular pattern, and each hard drive platter can only hold a set amount of data. Data is constantly written and erased throughout this entire platter, and any single file may be broken up into many little sectors throughout the disk. This isn’t normally a problem, though it can slow your system down over time as it takes longer to find and open files.



However, this can be a major problem with large video files, as these files will have to be split into smaller fragments as they are being written, and this slow-down can make your drive prone to dropped frames. When you defragment your drive, all the broken fragments are placed together, so that your hard drive has a large "physical area" of available space to write your video to.
 
Editor321 said:
However, this can be a major problem with large video files, as these files will have to be split into smaller fragments as they are being written, and this slow-down can make your drive prone to dropped frames. When you defragment your drive, all the broken fragments are placed together, so that your hard drive has a large "physical area" of available space to write your video to.
Click to expand...

I may be wrong, but I believe this is true before you capture and not after. Defragging a video drive after its been captured, that I dont know about. But I dont really think it would hurt.
 
In the old bad days of computing, when video was a magic art, disks were barely fast enough to serve up data at a speed that could simulate real motion video. When a file was fragmented into multiple parts, there would be some head seek time at the end of one part as the disk went to the next part. That delay would screw up the timing of video and was especially horrible on playback or output to tape. So generally, the video data had to be in one contiguous (not fragmented) file in order to support the time requirements.

Another scheme was to allow fragmentation, but the capturing program would store the actual address (cylinder, track, sector) of the start of the next part at the end of the previous part. In this way the program could use low-level disk commands to directly move the head to the continuation of the file without a lot of table look-ups and seek time. Of course, if the actual physical location on the disk is part of the file, and you move the file, the location is no longer good -- and the video file is completely corrupted.

So, in the dark ages of digital video, the first thing you'd do before capturing is format the target hard disk to ensure zero fragmentation.

Now nothing like this really exists today with modern computers, operating systems, disks, and video systems. The disk is fast enough to handle video playback speeds (with the proper codec). And the latency (delay) in seeking across a fragment is not significant and can be easily accomodated through buffering in the software.

So, on the one hand, on most systems today, until fragmentation gets REALLY bad, its generally not much of a performance issue and probably won't effect the video, and then only if your computer has a slow CPU and little memory. On the other hand, the file techniques used today isolate the file from the hardware, so the files don't have dependencies in them to a particular location on the disk. So... defrag is pretty much safe to do and it pretty much doesn't make a difference if you do it.

Some file systems today are more like databases, and they don't really need to be fragmented, because they do a pretty good job of dividing up and coalescing blocks of space by themselves as part of their memory management procedures. In particular, MACs don't usually need to be defragmented at all. On the PC, FAT formatted disks need occasional defragmentation. NTFS formatted disks less so.

I've defragged video files on my PC and Premiere had no problem and also showed no obvious benefit.

Some critical files in the OS have to be located at particular places on the disk. And some of these programs DO have references directly to the physical disk. Those applications cannot be moved or the OS or application will be damaged. So defragmenting with software that doesn't understand how a program declares itself to be "unmovable" could be dangerous. For this reason, I only use the defragmenter that is provided in Windows. And I never defrag OSX because all the defragmenters are third-party software.
 
Edweirdo said:
yes it does- most applications suggest you defragment your drive before installing, that way its files are not scattered about in different "holes"
Click to expand...

Which has nothing to do with it being an executable. You don't really want your data scattered about, either.

And it wastes space (not that that's much of issue these days..until your disk is almost full. Then it might matter. But at that point, you need a bigger drive, anyway.)
 
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