Defragmenting saves the hard disc?

Mile Bozicevic

Mile Bozicevic

Well-known member
Hi all.

Anyway, I have 2 hard discs, both of 450 GB, one with dual partition.
I edit weddings and similar stuff-anyway, I put video files on them and, who would say, delete it.

Now, I heard that I should be doing defragmentation of disc(s) after the material is captured and after the same one is being deleted.
This will prolonge the life of my discs and I will avoid getting errors and crashes that would be direct effect of big files on discs or something like that.
So, is that just some blabbering, or should I defragment each and every time I get some video, and delete it?
I guess it won't hurt to do so-it can be the same or better, but I just wanted to check how true that defrag statement is.

Thanks. :beer:
 
That's just some blabbering. I've heard it before, but thinking it through can't see where that would make sense. Defragmentation can enhance disc performance, but I see no way it could prolong the life. Technically the motor might get a little less use, but not much if any. Depending on your operating system you should be doing it periodically, but every file is too often. Actually, that would put enough strain on your disc that it might make things worse. Though it would also be in a small, not even noticeable way.

Also, it might find your short 'Fragment' and try to get rid of it if you run a deframenter too often.
 
I'm thinking the same way as you-but folks here are telling me: ''Hey, on my Fallout instalation of 8 GB says it's recommended to defrag.''

blah

So how much is too often?
Once in two weeks shouldn't be too much, and if Fragment get's lost, it's no big loss to world of film industry anyway.:D
 
Defragmentation will increase drive life. "Thrashing" - the read/write head having to jump all over the disc to find the next chunk of a file... puts the most wear on the drive components (you can hear all the ratchety clicking when the drive is thrashing around). Defragmenting aims to make files continuous on the disc, which avoids thrashing.

However... if you have multiple partitions, you can do just as well (or, better, and easier) by using one for temporary storage of project files, and reformatting it between projects. Or, reformat every few projects, and don't delete old projects in between.

Fragmenting occurs becuase the "free space" on the disc is scattered in many small pieces. When you first format a disc, the free space is one big chunk. If you only write files, they will all be continuous. However, say you have a 500GB disc. You write 300GB of video, now you have a 200GB big chunk of free space. Then, you delete 50GB. You have one 200GB and one 50GB chunk of free space. You Capture 75GB.. it's split between the 50GB chunk and the 200GB chunk, leaving you with a 175GB chunk of free space. You delete 60GB of old stuff.. now you have a 40GB chunk, a 20GB chunk, and a 175 GB chunk. You capture 100GB of footage, which ends up in 3 chunks, leaving you with a 135 GB chunk of free space. Etc... if you keep writing and deleting files, the chunks of free space get smaller and smaller, and the new files are written in more and more scattered chunks. To read the files, the drive has to do a lot of seeking, which slows things down and increases wear on components. As you can see, reformatting occasionally keeps fragmentation reasonable, and is faster and easier than defragmentation. Defragging is a better solution when you only have one drive, and can't format it easily on a project-by-project basis.
 
A lot also depends on the OS you are using. If you are on vista or win7 they defrag automatically when you are not using them. And XP does a pretty good job of keeping things together.

I think they real question we are getting to these days is; am I gaining anything noticeable from a defrag? With the MTF of HDDs and the advancement of computer operating systems I personally feel like the need to manually defrag is a thing of the past.
 
I would definitely recommend defragging esp if you do a lot of video/photo editing. I too use My PC for a little bit of the same and find a defragged condition of drives smoother if not faster than a heavily fragmented one. Besides its a headache to defrag once the drive is completely fragmented and also filled. BTW, I run Diskeeper on my drives. Its fantastic.:) Can be set to run auto and also defrags if you have low free space.
 
William_Robinette said:
A lot also depends on the OS you are using. If you are on vista or win7 they defrag automatically when you are not using them. And XP does a pretty good job of keeping things together.

I think they real question we are getting to these days is; am I gaining anything noticeable from a defrag? With the MTF of HDDs and the advancement of computer operating systems I personally feel like the need to manually defrag is a thing of the past.
Click to expand...

How old are you, anyway?
 
Get the AusLogics Disc Defrag. It's Free and WAY better than the windows one and only takes a few minutes, not 4 hours.
 
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