Defragmenting the hard drive

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
Are you supposed to defragment your hard drive after every project? I haven't done it yet and I just completed 6 projects over the last several months. On a G5 where do I go to do it? Is it in the Disk Utilities folder? I am not having any issues at the moment but I could have sworn that I read something about defragging your hard drive between projects.
 
Re: Defragmenting the hard drive

[quote author=DVX100Shooter link=board=FCP;num=1089563963;start=0#0 date=07/11/04 at 09:39:23]Are you supposed to defragment your hard drive after every project? I haven't done it yet and I just completed 6 projects over the last several months. On a G5 where do I go to do it? Is it in the Disk Utilities folder? I am not having any issues at the moment but I could have sworn that I read something about defragging your hard drive between projects.[/quote]

UNIX is a much different system than Windows or the old MacOS, and rarely has any issues with fragmentation due to its excellent handling of space utilization on a disk. With ten students using each of my G5s producing 15 hours of video each in five months, I have never run a disk scan that showed any significant speed loss due to fragmenting.

To be on the safe side, because students can and do screw up systems, I erase and low level format the media drives in our system at the end of the semester, and erase / rebuild the OS once a year even if it is running fine. A low level format will even write around bad blocks in a hard drive caused by disk damage.

If you are producing media, while it is ok to hold files on the boot drive and the ata and sata drives in the Power Mac are capable of handling the load for all but HD projects right out of the box, I normally suggest that all media and render files be kept on outboard drives or at least kept away from the boot drive. My current "standard" setup is a trio of drives besides the boot drive, two in RAID acting as the media drive and one as the render drive. Limitations in the number of internal drives in the G5 means I have to get outboard drives to do this.
 
Re: Defragmenting the hard drive

There is no built in defragger. I use TechTools. But then again, I don't have to defrag like I used to. Capturing media you've got such huge files there isn't a need to defrag... unless you've never done it.

CaptM
 
Re: Defragmenting the hard drive

My experiences with Norton's Defragmentation tools:

First run, it finished successfully.  However, system performance was significantly worse than it was before the defragmentation.  The program appears to still be trying to optimize the drive for how OS9 uses it.  I don't know if this has been fixed.

Second run, it completely corrupted my drive.  I had to reinstall the OS, and restore from backup.  Not a fun afternoon.

Realistically, there is no reason to defragment in OSX, mostly because the OS does it for you.  It auto-defragments files under a certain size (I think 20MB), which keeps the freespace reasonable clear.  It also has a fairly good algorithm for utilizing the free space.

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/ has a good description of what is going on.
 
Re: Defragmenting the hard drive

[quote author=d3z link=board=FCP;num=1089563963;start=0#3 date=07/14/04 at 07:36:23]My experiences with Norton's Defragmentation tools:

[/quote]

Oh -- dear God!!! Do NOT use Norton with OSX. They'll tell you they fixed their problems, but they didn't. For some reason, Norton products trash VIFs (very important files.)

CaptM
 
Re: Defragmenting the hard drive

Norton is one of those AWSP that get made for Mac simply because they are essential for PC, but they do zero. (AWSP = absolutely worthless software packages). There are some high level, very powerful disk utilities made for Mac OS-X, but no for deFragging, most of them are designed to recondintion damaged hard drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top