Defrag question

vicmilt wrote on 3/4/2003, 4:22 AM

I'm currently editing on two external Firewire Western Digital Drives... a 60mb and a 120mb. (Actually standard drives in Pyro housings)
They are 80% full. My biggest 2 files are 2 and 3Gig, but the bulk of them are in the 100 to 400Mb size.
I use Norton nightly to defrag, but it seems that I can't get the drives under 10% to 20% defragged. The 60Gig has gotten cranky, and will play, then pause for 5 seconds or so, and then continue.
Any thoughts?
And... does anyone have any thoughts about Norton defrag vs WinXP builtin defrag?

Comments

gunrock wrote on 3/4/2003, 5:01 AM

I have been looking into this problem recently, and I have found that Raxco's PerfectDisk 2000 is the only defragger that aims to consolidate files and the empty space.

This makes it more like the old DOS defraggers in that it doesn't just defrag your files, it moves them so that all files are contiguous and the empty storage space is at the end of the disk after all the files. This means that when you create new files (i.e capture new footage) it can write it one contiguous chunk and not need the disk head to seek to blank spots that may be all over the disks surface.

The other alternative is to archive or backup your disks and reformat them. Not always a practical option.

BTW, I'm not affiliated with Raxco in any way. I've just used there demo and am will purchase the product at the next payday.

Cheers

GR

Grazie wrote on 3/4/2003, 5:05 AM

Vicmilt - I don't have any of the s/w you have - WinME and MS defrag. I've read that you should quite a bit of "spare" space on drives to defrag anyway.

My 2 pennies worth.

TomG wrote on 3/4/2003, 7:23 AM

I brought up this question last month as well. You might do a search on degragment in this forum for some good info. I finally decided on perfectdisk from Raxco (http://www.raxco.com)to do the best job for me after it was recommended by another forum member. Diskkeeper was another title mentioned but haven't heard many good things about it.

Good luck

TomG