Here is how I back my claims

1) from Sony support Knowledgebase

"5.Make sure you do not look over simple steps such as Defragmenting the system, run a system scan and close down unnecessary background processes.

Defragment your hard drive.
To make sure data can be transferred as fast as possible to and from the hard drive, you should defragment it often. This will reduce the potential for buffer underruns when writing the CD. You should probably do a "files only" defragmentation, each time before you burn a CD. If you are going to create an image file, you may want to defragment the free space on the drive beforehand.

Defragment all the hard drives on your system.

7. Make sure there is sufficient space on all hard-drives that are being used by Vegas. You may also want to spend time defragmenting and checking your discs for errors.

From Wikipedia

Defragmentation is advantageous and relevant to file systems on electromechanical disk drives. The movement of the hard drive's read/write heads over different areas of the disk when accessing fragmented files is slower, compared to accessing the entire contents of a non-fragmented file sequentially without moving the read/write heads to seek other fragments.

From Microsoft

Fragmentation makes your hard disk do extra work that can slow down your computer. Removable storage devices such as USB flash drives can also become fragmented. Disk Defragmenter rearranges fragmented data so your disks and drives can work more efficiently. Disk Defragmenter runs on a schedule, but you can also analyze and defragment your disks and drives manually. To do this, follow these steps:

From techexplainer

Defragging or defragmenting hard drive on a regular basis increases the overall health and speed of computer system. Defragging is a process of reducing the amount of fragmentation. Fragmentation makes inefficient use of storage space, reducing storage capacity and performance of the hard drive.

From window's secrets

I admit the first is anecdotal and subjective, so you’re free to disregard it. That said, I’ve seen the benefits of defragging many, many times when I’ve cleaned up PCs crippled by serious performance issues. Such PCs’ drives are almost always severely fragmented, and they almost always perform noticeably better after a thorough defrag.

From PCWorld

That said, a bimonthly pass with a capable defragger can help you maintain peak performance on a heavily used hard drive

From ProSoft Engineering in referecene to Macs

So how does this benefit Mac recovery and digital image recovery software? When a file is deleted or a drive is reformatted, the information that tells the computer where the file is located is gone, often permanently. File Recovery software then has to search the drive byte by byte for the file by looking for a known pattern. If the file was fragmented, multiple parts of the file are scattered across the drive, which makes identification of these parts very difficult, if not impossible, since they won’t all match the pattern. However, if the file is not fragmented, the chance of recovery is very good since the file is stored in the same area on the drive and its patterns are easily recognizable.

From ME Computer Services

Sometimes you may notice that your computer is having a hard time. You can even hear the hard drive grinding as is searches for the file you want to open. The probable culprit is fragmentation of your hard drive. Simply put, fragmentation is the splitting up of a file into multiple locations on the hard drive. Maybe it is a file that you have been using for a while (such as a monthly report) and there are a lot of files opened between the time that you opened it last and now. When you opened it last month, it was saved in the first available space on the hard drive at the end of the drive. But only the added data is saved there. The rest of the file remains in its previous locations (remember, it does the same thing each time), so if you are not defragmenting your hard drive at all, think of how many different places on your hard drive that a piece of that file exists. Now multiply that by all the files you have on your computer (music, pictures, and documents) not to mentions all the operating systems files needed for your computer to operate. Do you see the problem?

What a defragmenter does is takes all of those files (where it can, sometimes certain operating systems files cannot be moved) and puts them back together in one place on the hard drive. Depending on the last time you defragged, this can be a long or short operation. Also, you must take under consideration how much data is on your hard drive. It is required to have at least 15% free space in order to defrag a system and the more data you have on the system, the slower the process to defrag that system. On another of my blogs I will discuss how to free up space on your system to make it run more efficiently and that will also help you with the defragmenting process.

From Apple Insider Forum

The difference: night and day. I defragged my computer's hard drive using Drive Genius, which only took just under an hour. Huge difference. Everything feels much more snappy. Apparently, even though OSX automatically defrags files under 20MB, defragging manually every once in a while has its benefits. Think about it: how many files under 20MB are actually haphazardly deposited on your drive? If anything, smaller files are LESS LIKELY to need defragging; large files require more space and thus have the potential to be put in a bunch of random places, slowing down your drive.


There are a lot of others in forums, but I can't vouch for their credibility. All sites seem to not recommend defragging for solid state drives. I did not find one site that had credible evidence of additional wear on a drive and even sites that did not recommend fragmenting said it generally does no harm, just a waste of time. Now as I state earlier, the need for defragmenting for SPEED is less because hard drives have become so fast. This does not mean they are working efficiently, just that they are fast enough to make up for the lack of efficiency.

There seems to be a presumption that comparisons of file transfer rates between drives (which are well-known and abundantly documented) somehow relate to encoding/decoding of media in a nonlinear editing environment. I have scoured the internet and have found no clear evidence that such a relationship exists, while there is plenty of evidence that drive throughput is almost never a potential encoding bottleneck with consumer formats. However, I did find the references from 6-8 years ago I mentioned, when both Apple and Avid specifically recommended against defragging media drives. More current references on that question seem to be a bit divided . . .

In any event, this further dispersal of focus makes me glad it is being discussed here, rather than in the original thread, which is only about smart-rendering AVC in order to save time. . .
:o

I am with JohnMeyer on not defragging, but I am using Win7 which does do light defragging by default.

Defrag is an anachronism (like disk partitioning) when a 10Gb hard drive was a luxury.

Disk drivers at that time in history were quite dumb and only could read one sector at a time. So if the data were consecutive on the disc it would take less time to read a file. (For the purist, optimum defrag put consecutive data in every other sector. When a sector was read, there's some processor time to move the data to memory, and when the processor is ready for the next sector, the heads were already in the middle of the next adjacent sector. Alternate sectors meant that the disc did not have to spin another rotation to get the next data).

This is why you have a RAM buffer in your hard drive. Original hard disk drives did not have any buffer.

Another anachronistic complication was that when you captured video in real-time either analog or DV/AVI, most capture programs required blank contiguous free space on the hard disk. (Drives and PCs were just not fast enough to wait for the HDD to find the next available empty sector). When 10 or 20 Gb was all you had, finding 4gb of contiguous disc space often required defragging.

Because of all the advances of disk size and buffering, driver algorithms, and background-defrag in Win 7, you really do not *need* to defrag any longer.

Steve

Does anyone realize there are different defrag tools and they operate differently.
Windows7 Defrag tool working in default installation is set to do light defrag on a regular basis. This is because of the evolution of faster drive interfaces, more value in harddrive ram cache aboard and generally more powerful computers.

BUT, the example of capturing video uncompressed as I do to both traditional interfaces and drives, as well as to the newer fast SSD - still works best when working to deliver to contiguous space - this has not changed!

One last comment in response to several of the previous posts.

While my tests definitely showed me that I was wrong about defrag not making any difference in performance, I want to make it clear that I don't think that I have never once seen defrag help a client's computer when that computer was operating at horribly slow speeds. While I have never (before yesterday) run defrag on my own computers, I have tried running it on computers that people bring to me that were suffering from terrible slowness. I have seen literally dozens of computer which took several minutes for even the simplest of applications to run, and which would take over ten minutes to boot.

Defrag made no difference on these computers. At all. Even a little bit.

Based on my own experience, the most common causes of significant slowdown -- things which actually make your computer take longer to complete a task -- are the following:

Anti-virus software
Bad printer drivers (HP is the worst offender)
Background processes
Automatic updates (a special category of background process)
Cross-linked files that result from constant crashes (common here where we have monthly power outages)

The key thing in this discussion about disk defrag is whether you will actually notice a difference when doing real work. Will the computer boot faster? Will applications open more quickly? Will you be able to render faster? Will the timeline video play more smoothly?

I am not convinced that you will get any perceptible improvement in any of these things by doing a defrag or, if you do get some improvement, that it will be more than a few percent. Yes, I did see some huge improvements in file transfer tests, and if you run applications where disk throughput is the bottleneck, then you would definitely get a big boost by doing defrag.

In the end, I'm not sure it is worth spending all this time on the subject, and I'm going to now go off and do other things. Unlike those things I listed above, which can bring your computer to its knees, disk fragmentation is a minor issue for video editors. Spend your time instead on figuring out how to get your GPU to work reliably (I don't think this is possible with Vegas) and how to get the right CPU/motherboard for your next editing workstation.

That will be time well spent.

+1

My understanding is that what inspired the current interest in this topic was "smart rendering".
If that's the case then the critical factor is sustained data rate. Modern CPUs and their busses are way faster than what mechanical drives and SSDs can deliver. The physical file location on the drive has around a 2:1 factor on how fast it can be read due to the difference in aerial density and I *think* it's the same for writing a file.

In this case having the source file on the inner part of one drive and the output file on another empty drive would, I'm confident, yield a significant reduction in smart render times.

The other impact if we're talking about editing quickly is how long Vegas takes to build its sfk files. I think here too sustained data rate would be a significant factor. It's a pity that Vegas cannot be told where to put those files unlike the competition.

Bob.

So judging from the responses, there are no tests, charts, comparisons that show that defragging is detrimental to the life of a harddrive or can cause even worse performance. It seems to be more personal/anecdotal opinions.

That was my original reason for challenging the claims by some that defragging was a bad thing.

Thanks

Defragging is a good thing regarding the placement of project resources and the extras like the small but numerous amount of *.sfk and the like generated in VegasPro projects. But once again it is important to point out that this has most importance in multi-stream uncompressed video to and from workflows, and is really least important to rendering processes that are part of highly-compressed codecs.

So judging from the responses, there are no tests, charts, comparisons that show that defragging is detrimental to the life of a harddrive or can cause even worse performance. It seems to be more personal/anecdotal opinions.There is considerable information, from reliable sources, on what causes disk drives to fail prematurely:

Here is one from a company that specializes in data recovery:

Serial Killers: The 6 Worst Hard Drive Destroyers

These people know more about the practical real-world aspects of disk drives, even more than even the people who make them, because they deal with the failures, not the design and manufacturing.

Here is a similar summary:

6 Worst Reasons of hard disk failure

Included on both lists are these two causes: heat, and wear from operation (i.e., the more you read & write, the shorter the life of the drive). These both relate directly to what happens to a drive during the uninterrupted, continuous read & write operations that go on for hours at a time. Almost nothing else you do with your computer comes even close to exercising the drive at 100% of its abilities for this length of time.

I have two removable drive bays on my computer. I also have six fans in the computer case. I have tested temperatures, and the fans do a pretty good job of cooling various components ...

... however ...

When I put the computer in standby to remove a drive, if that drive hasn't been used for a few minutes, it is cool to the touch. However, if I have just finished doing a big copy operation, like those that I did for the tests I described above, it is very hot to the touch.

I have a "point 'n shoot" infrared thermometer that I could use to put numbers to this observation.

The point is that, as I described in my long post, I have NEVER seen the disk light on my computer flash solid red for five straight hours, and I am absolutely certain that the disk drive heat exceeded whatever maximum it had ever achieved under normal operation.

I cannot find specific tests, or conclusions from a source that I would consider to be authoritative, to back up my claim that disk defrag might lead to earlier failure. However, I can tell you for sure that every drive enclosure I ever purchased that didn't have a fan, ultimately died. Since I switched to using only enclosures with big huge noisy fans, I have not had a single failure. Google did some studies that seem to contradict this, but in looking at those studies, those drives still didn't get all that hot.

So, while I cannot absolutely prove that defrag will lead to premature disk failure, the heat issue is quite real.

If I get a chance, I'll do a test with my infrared thermometer and post the results.

This announcement as reprinted below has just made the rounds of Microsoft channels within the last few days - Please read!

Question. Do you still have to defragment the hard-disk drive on a Windows 8.1 computer to keep it from running slow?

Aanswer. Microsoft still recommends regular maintenance like defragmenting your drive to improve the PC’s performance. With Windows 8.1, however, the Disk Defragmenter tool that came with previous Windows versions is now called Optimize Drives. In the default Windows 8.1 setting, it runs automatically once a week and uses the optimization method that works best for the type of drive in your computer.

You can still run the program manually, or change the frequency of the automatic optimization sessions to daily or monthly. To find the Optimize Drives tool, point to the screen’s upper-right corner and move the cursor down to pop open the Charms menu; on a touch-based computer, you can also swipe in from the right edge of the screen with a fingertip to open the Charms. Choose Search on the Charms menu, type in “defragment” and select “Defragment and optimize your drives.”

The Optimize Drives box opens and displays a list of drives or partitions on the PC, along with each one’s current state of fragmentation, when it was last optimized and the type of drive. Select the drive you want to use and click the Optimize button; you can also choose the Analyze button to see if the drive needs optimization. Click the Change Settings button if you want to adjust the maintenance schedule.

I did a test to see if defrag raised the temperature of my drive.

1. I made sure the drive was spinning, but did not read or write to the drive for ten minutes. I put the computer in standby, removed the drive, and took its temperature with an IR thermometer pointed at the black metal casting. It measured 78 degrees F.

2. I loaded up 35 minutes of AVCHD video on the Vegas timeline and let it play, uninterrupted, for 25 minutes. When I removed the drive and immediately measured the temperature, it was 92.5 degrees F.

3. I ran disk defrag for 25 minutes and then measured the temperature, it was higher, but not by much, measuring 95 degrees.

I don't think this is enough to cause any increased failure rate due to temperature.

Drive temp external and drive load are not directly related as johnmeyer would like to have implied by his test above.

Drives are built inside of cases that are built to radiate temp with design considerations by the manufacturer. This is why you will find drives of different origin and design run at slightly diff temps.

What is wholly important to note is that the manufacturer has also considered how the drive may fit into overall exposure and airflow for optimum control. Take a normal internal drive design and bring it external to the PC and expose it to more airflow of moderate means - you can bring down the idle and busy temps.

I have absolutely no idea of what you are trying to say.

It seems you are saying that if a drive head is operating 100% of the time, that it doesn't consume more power and therefore doesn't generate more heat. Since I just did the tests, and just proved that it did get hotter, I don't get your point.

Your second statement is that drives from different manufacturers might run at different temperatures. Fair enough, but what point are you trying to make?

What is wholly important to note is that the manufacturer has also considered how the drive may fit into overall exposure and airflow for optimum control. Take a normal internal drive design and bring it external to the PC and expose it to more airflow of moderate means - you can bring down the idle and busy temps.

I don't understand this at all. I did not run my drive outside of my PC: I ran it inside my PC, in my removable drive bay, and then put the PC in standby, removed the drive, and measured its temperature by measuring the surface temperature of the main heatsink. The thermal mass of the heatsink assures that the temperature won't decline much during the 10-15 seconds it takes to power down the PC, remove the drive, and measure the temperature. The fact that it is black aluminum means that it is a very efficient conductor of heat, and therefore does a pretty good job of representing the internal temperature of the drive.

"3. I ran disk defrag for 25 minutes and then measured the temperature, it was higher, but not by much, measuring 95 degrees.

It's not the temperature difference that matters. It's that you ran the drive for 25 minutes and thus used up 25 minutes of it's eventual lifespan without accomplishing productive work and getting something back out of the drive for that expenditure.

If I was concerned about running the drive for 25minutes just today - then I have a whole lot of worry about all of my servers that run 24hours a day and never turn off!
Da!

The temp diff between a drive run normal and run defrag is in fact no greater and perhaps less in range than the drive brought into environments with different airflow or drives that are different in manufacture or materials in construction. The temp diff is insignificant.

[I]"It's not the temperature difference that matters. It's that you ran the drive for 25 minutes and thus used up 25 minutes of it's eventual lifespan without accomplishing productive work and getting something back out of the drive for that expenditure."[/I]

I'd be more concerned about using up 25 minutes of MY lifespan. Unless the 25 minutes it takes to defrag can be shown to reduce your next render by more than 25 minutes then it's just wasting time.

In the context of the original question, how to get the fastest smart render then the answer is to have two blank disks. Load all the days media onto one drive, do the quick edits to trim the heads and tails and then render to the second drive. If the job spans multiple days have new source drives for each day.

Bob.

[i]"The temp diff is insignificant."
Unless they say MyBook. Not made for movies, editing, network media, or (perhaps), defragging.

It's not the temperature difference that matters. It's that you ran the drive for 25 minutes and thus used up 25 minutes of it's eventual lifespan without accomplishing productive work and getting something back out of the drive for that expenditure.Yup, although I'll anticipate the next post which will point out that 25 minutes out a disk drive lifetime of 3-4 years (of 24/7 operation) is not even a drop of water compared to the ocean.

The point I think you should be making is that it is time taken away from doing something more productive. The whole defrag thing reminds me of watching someone with a compulsive disorder who must go through a series of pointless rituals before they can walk out the door of their room. In both that case, and with defrag, there is no harm to the ritual, and perhaps it makes the person feel better about themselves, but looking at it from a sane person's viewpoint, that time sure as heck could have been spent better doing something more productive.

[I] The whole defrag thing reminds me of watching someone with a compulsive disorder who must go through a series of pointless rituals before they can walk out the door of their room.[/I]

Whathesaid!

Johnmeyer, I appreciate your efforts in testing. I don't really appreciate the implication that someone who follows suggested guidelines for keeping their hard drive running optimally is insane or has a compulsive disorder.

If you knew someone who has a compulsive disorder, you might better understand that the rituals are not pointless to them.

Bob,

althgough time savings has been a topic in this thread, the time savings, however minimal, is a side effect of the defragging. The main reason for defrag, as I backed up with my links above, is to make the hard drive work more efficiently, thus saving wear and tear.

So far, none of the naysayers have supported their claims of damage or waste of time when defragmenting their drive. I don't care what people do with their harddrives, my original concern was incorrect or unsupported information being supplied.