Media Drives and Fragmentation

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:

1. "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:

2. "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?????
 
When I defrag my video drives the system speeds up noticeably. My system is pretty fast anyway, but the only time I have gotten any dropped frames/freezes, defragging fixed it.

Defragging once in awhile actually means the drives are working less overall, because though they have to work hard to defrag, they work even harder to seek fragmented files that should be all in one. Just make sure you have enough extra space for the defrag to work properly.
 
The necessity and value of defragmentation for any drive really depends upon the structure of the machine that is being used with. If if is a single drive machine, then obviously, defraging would be essential. If, however, the drive only contains data that is never rewritten, then defragging the drive is nearly useless (and carry's an extremely small risk, likely not even worth considering).

The best approach in terms of stability and speed is to have multiple drives. Placing the application, data and working files on different and perhaps more importantly, dedicated purpose drives is the best way to optimize any NLE.
 
Defragging your media drive on your PC regularly makes a huge difference simply because you keep writing and deleting files on the drive all the time. The reason why Apple does not reccommend doing this has to do with the logging system in macs. but for a pcs, defrag all the time, at last when you have finalized one project and are about to start a new one.
 
For the Avid non-linear editing systems, they recommend NOT defraging media drives.

vidwerk.
 
I never defrag my system drive on mac... but I do clean out my scratch disks, and saved files drives and reformat them once evey few month. On pc with ppro I regularly defrag my drives... system speeds up as a result.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top