You can set SR to use any amount of disk space you want. I have mine set to the default of 12% which is the max setting but hardly a 'ton' of space. If I ever manage to fill my drives up to near that point I'll probably just buy a new drive anyway.

I have to chime in again on this one. Fragmentation really isn't that big a problem with modern computers and hard drives. Even an excessively fragmented drive can still read and write data much faster than a DV data stream. If you're having problems with dropped frames, it's much more likely due to something else running in the background than to drive fragmentation. I've gone 6 months on my 866P3 computer without defragmenting, had the allocation tables look like swiss cheese, and still captured hours worth of DV without dropping frames.

Drive Image and Ghost, similar third party applications are intended mainly for system restore and backup in case of a major disaster. Both are clumsy and time consuming to setup and maintain while the built in 'system restore' part of the XP operating system works seemlessly in the background. However, like a lot of Microsoft services, slow, ill mannered and prone to not work as much as it does work which is the main reason I gave it the heave-ho.

While a severely fragemented drive can work reasonablly well, it won't work as well as it is designed to. Every time the system has to search for file fragements, what it has to do when files aren't contiguous, you are causing the drive head mechanism a lot of grief and making it jump all over the place which for sure will make your drive die an early death. Sorry, I freak if I see any of my drives more than 2-3% fragemented and for system restore to cause fragemenation upwards of 80-90% is totally ridicilious to say nothing of the drive space wasted.

I'm curious whether your running thin on free space with your Windows XP. And how much RAM do you have? I'm using XP Professional and don't often see fragmentation as high at 20%. Maybe something besides Windows XP is the culprit.

JBJones

>>>Sorry, I freak if I see any of my drives more than 2-3% fragemented

no need to freak. I go 3-4 months without even thinking about defragging. the only drives that have died on me have died in the first year of operation, probably due to a defect or in a couple cases extreme temperature changes.

maybe in the lab it makes a difference to drive life, but that's kind of like when deciding whether to overclock or not. it might shorten the life of the CPU from 10 years to 5 years, but in 5 years my CPU will be worth less than a dead rat in a tampon factory.

I don't use XP but have used Ghost extensively at work and at home. I ghost and image of drive C: to another drive on the system and/or to CDR. Restores from hard drive to hard drive take about 12 minutes. The only setup required for Ghost is to put the executable on a boot floppy. To back up to CDR the appropriate drives need to be on the floppy as well. To remain current I just create an new image as needed then delete the old one. At work I support about 900 workstations and 85 servers and have never seen an error restoring a system from a image that was not due to a problem at the physical level. Just my experience...yours may vary.

I also defrag on a regular basis as I have a hard time with leaving a drive in a less than optimal state. I keep my computer system very orderly but everything else...forget about it.

respectfully,

Steve