Disk fragmentation

teomorell wrote on 10/9/2001, 6:23 PM

After capturing some video from my camcorder I have noticed that the video file is highly fragmented.
If I render that file to a new DV (no CPU processing), one minute takes 45 seconds.
After defragmenting the HDD, it only takes 26 seconds, so fragmentation matters.

As I have a 60GB HDD for my system, I capture to this disk, and then move it to my RAID disk 150GB. This create an unfragmented video file. This works ok, but I just wonder who is the guilty here?. The OS (Windows 2000), the capture card (ADS Pryro) or the capture utility (v2.5).

I think the files should not get fragmented since it is like a copy and I have plenty of free disk space.

Comments

pelvis wrote on 10/9/2001, 8:40 PM

The fragmenting of the file is likely due the status of your drive. If the drive is defragged regularly (like every night), then it is more likely you'll wind up with a contiguous file when capturing, recording, or rendering.

teomorell wrote on 10/10/2001, 7:52 AM

Yeap, that is what I thought before. I noticed the this after capturing a video to a clean formated HDD.
Very strange!

Cheesehole wrote on 10/10/2001, 6:33 PM

you should investigate this with a disk mapping utility that can show you exactly where your captured file is on the disk. sorry i don't know of one, but many years ago the dos version of norton utilities could do it. to me it seems very unlikely that the OS would fragment your captured file on a disk that has contiguous space available. but i'd be interested to know what you discover. it seems very strange indeed...