Any way to decrease hard drive fragmentation?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Uladine
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Uladine

Uladine

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It seems like whenever I do a long project (lots of recording, undoing and deleting) in Sonar, My 40 GB 7200 rpm Maxtor Hard drive gets so fragmented that I have to defrag it every few days. Is there any way to lessen the frequency of defrag times? Should I clean the audio disk after every session or will this make any difference at all? I wish I had two PC's in rack cases with removable drives so I could have a dedicated "hard drive defragmenter" PC.
 
I heard some people over at Cubase forum defragment their HD every night....they reckon they need to...so you ,with every few days, are not so bad...:)
 
The hd is like a sheet of paper and you writing on it, everytime you decide to erase something it leaves a blank space there, With our logic we would not try to write the next line of our thoughts in the scattered erased spaces, we`d start a new line.Hard drives aren`t that smart yet. Or is it really smart? we`d run out of paper fast starting new lines every time we had a new thought. THe hard drive uses the recovered space more efficiently, it looks for the first availible space to write part of a file. So if you just erased something thats already on there the drive will use that space to write its next task and then skip over to the next availible space if the first one fills. The downside is that when its seeking a file, it must go find all the pieces and that takes time. To fix it we must defragment. I wonder if our brains defragment while we sleep and fill wasted space? I like to sleep about 12 to 15 hrs at the time, I`m usually defragmented.
For now thats pretty much the way it is. Hopefully there will be a more intelligent controller to come along that will allow you to select a designated area of the hd to work on a specific file. Even then you`ll need to tidy up occasionally.
 
as a part of my comp sci. master's i attempted to create an active hard drive defrag scheme that would run in the background to keep the HD defragmented whenever it had time to run... sort of like how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) will perform memory cleanup (ie.. garbage collection) while the java app executes.

i ended up doing spread spectrum technology. in other words... it was easier figuring out a wireless LAN than it was to auto defrag a hard drive.
 
I use "Executive Software Diskeeper" and I have it scheduled to run in the middle of the night. Make sure not to enable frag guard. You don't want it running in the background while your working.
 
Actually, Novell servers defrag themselves constantly, and have ben doing it for years.


I agree that the best thing is just to defragment overnight. Save finished projects as .BUN files and get them off your hard drive and onto CDR as soon as you can.
 
I defrag my 4x18.1GB SCSI array once every two hours of audio recording. It's a must for squeezing performance.
 
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