I find that I have to defrag after adding or deleting clips.

Once again, why do you have to? What doesn't work right if you don't defrag?

I'm with you on this Chienworks. Don't give up - I'm waiting and reading K's response with eager anticipation. - Grazie

I’m with Chienworks and Grazie on the need to defrag, but if you feel compelled to defrag, Norton Systemworks is much better than the free defrag that comes with Windows.

~jr

Yes JR - But why is Kriben compelled to do it? Is it an addiction or what? I know I've got the same problem with Old Startrek TV shows - There, I've admitted it! OKAY! AND do you know what - I . . . I . . . I feel rather better for doing it . .. somehow I feel cleansed . . . Ah, the power of confession!

K why do you need and wanna do it?

Grazie

There does seem to be a defrag-mania going on. Yes, i agree, defragging can be useful. I'm not totally against it. However, i get the feeling that lots of people think it's a necessary step before doing anything. It's usually not. The time savings it gives by speeding up disk access is incredibly minimal, and this is vastly more than offset by the time it takes to defrag. It's also a tremendous amount of abuse on the hard drive and can wear it out much faster than normal use. It puts your data in jeopardy by moving it around and every move is another opportunity for it to be lost or corrupted.

The only time defragging really makes a difference is for very time critical operations such as capturing and printing to tape, or playing back multiple tracks in real-time. Even then, it's only necessary for slower computers. A 700MHz+ computer with ATA/100 drives should easily be able to keep up with a 30Mb/s DV stream or many disk-based audio tracks even with heavy fragmentation. For that matter, large files such as audio & video media tend to fragment far less than smaller files. When you encounter heavy fragmentation on a drive, it's usually other files besides media that suffer most of the fragmentation.

*sigh* I guess i'm sort of a one-man army on this topic. I just like to see people understand why they are doing things with their computer so they can make intelligent choices rather than just blindly following the trends.

Chienworks - I'm with you on this! I started getting dire warnings that disk fragmentation was killing my VAXs back in the early 80's. It wasn't true then, and now I find it doesn't affect my PCs either (though for different reasons).

Ian G.

Grazie, Hmmm… old StarTrek TV shows. Sounds very therapeutic. But let’s face it... “He’s dead Jim!” ;-)

I guess some people wash their hands a lot. Some people defrag a lot. It must be a cleansing thing.

Since Kriben has not been back to tell us why I can only assume he’s having some kind of performance problem that he attributes to a fragmented disk. I think the problem is proliferated by help desk people who think defrag is the answer to all problems. I agree that it could affect capture but that’s about it.

I know over on the Pinnacle forums, people claim that whenever they call the help desk with a problem, they’re told to uninstall the program, defrag their hard drive and reinstall the program. I had the Ulead DVD MovieFactory support tell me my audio sync problem was caused by a fragmented hard drive. I told them they were crazy but just to humor them, I defragged my drive, created another SVCD and had the same problem. A month later they came out with a patch for their audio sync problem. So you can’t blame people for getting defrag crazy when the support people are always throwing that at them.

~jr

As Spock says...

P_L - THAT IS SOOOOooooo FUNNY!!!! Where 'ave you been - eh? Good to hear from you again!

Yes, JR, I agree with you. There is much "advice" profferred by well meaning tech support people. They are often doing a job under extremis - yes?

I've recentlly been told that I should reformat my hd and resintall, because my NAV was crashing my sys on WEB access - ALL I HAD TO DO WAS tell NAV IE was one of my selected programmes - huh!

Hey ho was it ever thus! - Sometimes we are need to keep coooool and apply some simple modifacations.

Anyways - what was K getting that needed to always defrag? - I suppose we will never know! Hiyah Kriben! Are you out there come back - good buddy!

Grazie

Chienworks...Thanks for the info. I had no idea that defraging could be unhealthy for my HD. When I first started with NLE, it was alway suggested to defrag frequently.

So, my question is...When XP tells me I don't need to defrag...I should 'listen' to it, and leave it alone?

I always figured when I'm doin alot of capturing...deleting...rendering...deleting...and, moving files around, then I should defrag???

Thanks, Jon

P_L, yours was the first post I looked at this morning and that started my day off with a BIG SMILE. :-D ROTFL. thx. OK, now a laugh for you. Check out me as Kirk on my web site.

Stiffler, if you’re using XP with NTFS I would definitely listen to what it’s telling you. The structure for NTFS is designed to be less sensitive to fragmentation than FAT. When you defrag in FAT, it actually writes the files contiguously. This is not true with NTFS. It keeps a hierarchy of nodes instead of a linear list like FAT. What defrag on NTFS tries to do is minimize the number of nodes you need to traverse to retrieve a file but NOT to get it down to just one chunk. So you should not need to defrag as much with NTFS. NTFS is also a journaling file system so it keeps a record of changes and can rebuild quicker and more accurately after a crash than FAT. If you’re not using NTFS I would recommend using it.

I defrag before I start a project, which only takes a few seconds because I usually wipe my capture drive almost clean after a project. I have never needed to defrag during a project. That assumes you have 2.5x the disk space you need on your capture drive. If your capture drive is too small, I could see where things could get more fragmented as your project proceeds. In general, if you’re not experiencing any problems like frame drops, there’s no need to defrag during a project.

~jr

JR - so which one's you? You're right about the Pinacle advice on uninstalling; I started to worry when I discovered there's a utility specificaly to uninstall Studio properly!

Ian G.

JohnnyRoy,
I find your picture... fascinating.

> so which one's you?

I’m the one *without* the multi-million dollar movie contract. :(

~jr

JohnnyRoy,

Thanks for all the info. I do have NTSF and XP. I admit I don't understand everything you said, but I understand a little more now. I'll take your (and Chienworks) advice.

Jon

I defrag because I've been told by the Sonic people to do so, especially when downloading clips. Also, as part of my computer conditioning, it was explained that defrag is what every computer user must do to make programs run faster. And as I've been experiencing all kinds of problems with hard drives recently, I thought that I might as well sort out the defrag problem, in case it was contributing to it.I've got a third new hard drive within a week; I've managed to complete a first draft edit of a 25 minute documentary,and again I can't get into Windows (98 SE). This time I only have minimal programs installed as I am using my laptop for general work. Something must be causing Windows to crash like this. It starts off by saying that there is a problem with the registry, and then it just refuses to start.

Any suggestions welcome. (The computer store technician changes his explanations every day.)

Kriben

Kriben

Can we clarify what's happened, please? You have a laptop (with 1 disk?) that produced registry errors before failing to run the o/s. The HD's replaced but the same problem happens?

Ian G.

No, my laptop is my backup computer. My main PC is a celeron 1.7 gig with a 40 gig slave drive solely for video work, while my primary drive is 30 gigs. It appears I had two different problems. A defective primary drive (Maxtor), but also a defective memory chip. I was alerted to the latter by the nature of the problem (system registry corruption and Windows failing to open) by a Microsoft article. The computer store tested the memory chip and found it to be defective. I hope to have the PC back tomorrow.