NTFS or Fat32/ OS XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Fusion2
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I'm no computer scientist, but I have been playing with these things for over 20 years.

I do not doubt the claims by those that defrag infrequently. Your system can either handle... or fail to handle... the workload that you give it.

Here's my experience:

After trying to avoid using XP (I've got 2000 pro on my other computers) I was forced to get it with my non linear video editing system... because it is more stable than 2000.

XP does seem to frag pretty quickly, and those 'in the know' in video circles all agree that you should defrag your drives before capture and before final render.

I have four hard drives in this system... a 40 gig system drive, two 80 gig in a raid array (acting as one drive), and an 80 gig output drive. With video, it's best to record to the two disk array (for highest throughput) and render the "mix" to another drive. I do the same for audio.

I defrag the raid array before a capture and then again before a final mix. I also defrag the render drive before the final mix.

I defrag the system drive every week, as well as run a variety of system tests and cleanup duties.

Whether you want to take these steps is up to you. I am sure you could drive a car 100,000 miles without changing the oil, but I bet you wouldn't try. A good system regimen can go a long way towards keeping your computer in top running condition.

My personal recommendation is Norton SytemWorks.

My 2 cents:)
 
video editing, gameing, and audio processing at high mhz (2000+) show the effect of fragging your disk, its nothing to write home about at times but i've seen a system slow down and heat up because of it...

hardware make/brand and system config has an effect also... win xp is a large os indeed, keeping it under control helps i believe, with all the services being used the speed up effect of fragging should be noticable, at high mhz anyway, not sure about 600-1000mhz...

again, thanks for the input
 
Doug Quance said:
I am sure you could drive a car 100,000 miles without changing the oil, but I bet you wouldn't try. A good system regimen can go a long way towards keeping your computer in top running condition.
Click to expand...

Not to keep this thread going or anything but comparing a fragmented hard drive to a car that needs an oil change is a really bad and terribly false analogy. Don't you think?
 
Perhaps it wasn't the best analogy...

But the concept is there. A badly fragged drive will slow down system performance.

No, you won't suffer a breakdown on the side of the road.

The point is, we've all been taught how to care for a car... at least as far as an oil change goes. But not all of us see the benefit of routine computer system maintenance.

Posters in this thread have said they defrag as little as once a year. I know people that have never changed their oil. They both share a belief that everythings okay... because for them, it is.

So, no I don't believe it's a "really bad and terribly false analogy":D
 
Doug Quance said:
Posters in this thread have said they defrag as little as once a year. I know people that have never changed their oil. They both share a belief that everythings okay... because for them, it is.

So, no I don't believe it's a "really bad and terribly false analogy":D
Click to expand...

Hang on now, it's not just "believing" that everything ok, it's achieving a level of "okness" via the collection of quantifiable evidence and verifying that data against measurable system requirements.

If 32 track 24/96 playback requires a constant 9MB/sec sustained transfer, and a heavily fragmented drive can provide 15MB/sec sustained transfer in the worst case, for example, then defragging the drive such that it can provide 25MB/sec sustained transfer only improves performance beyond our maximum requirement, which means our maintence has been a waste of time.

It is possible that working the drive harder due to fragmentation may shorten its life, but MTBF values on all drives are high enough that it should not be an issue unless your system is poorly conditioned.

You make it sound like people who don't defrag are just "not in the know." :)

And video is a completely different process. Multitrack audio playback is the process of reading very small amounts of data from many large files spread out on a drive, over a very long period of time (to the machine). Indeed the interleaving (predictable fragmentation) created by recording multiple tracks simultaneously can even be beneficial. Video playback is the process of reading very large amounts of data from a single sequential file. If I was working with video I'd probably do a lot of maintence on my array!

Then I don't mean to fuel the analogy wars too much, but not changing oil will not result in poor performance only because the car will begin to fail. Not defragmenting a drive will simply result in less performace that can be easily rectified.

Anyhow, I'm not "against" defragmentation. In especially severe cases I've certainly seen it hinder performance...especially on old 4800/5400RPM drives....and yeah, after about 6-12 months of heavy use I defragment my own drives....and I can imagine that in a video editing system it would prove to be a pretty big deal! A lot of people just take it way to seriously. I've seen plenty of gamers, for instance, claim that defragging their hard drive both increased framerates and decreased or fixed crashes! The problem often is the mind. How many people do some "tweak" on their system and are totally fooled by the reboot that the tweak requires!! Or the time that they've spent away from the system, coupled with false expectations!

Oh well, this thread has gotten a little silly. What was the subject?

Oh yeah, go with NTFS. :)

Slackmaster 2000
 
In that case, I stand corrected.

Like I said, I am no computer scientist!

Interesting bit about the interleaving concept... I really hadn't thought about that. :eek:
 
I guess it happens in video, as well, because of a feature referred to as "scene detection" which captures each scene shot as a separate file. Of course, the final "mix" is output as a single file.

Well, that's why I'm here. It never hurts to learn something new

:D
 
Just converted my file system to NTFS (I run WindowsXP & HomeStudio2002) and I'm an extremely happy puppy now!

Enormous increase in system stability and more important: a weird latency 'bug' in HomeStudio2002 seems to be solved (Sometimes when I recorded an audio track the recorded track was some milleseconds late. I had to split the track, delete the silence, and pull the track to the left to get it right. Or record it again. Very annoying. But it's solved. Yay! :D )
 
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