defragmenting video storage drives/Premiere Pro 1.5

[Blast1]

[Robert in Naples] “I was told from a friend that you should not defragment video storage drives”

Video drives should be defragged when you remove old source files and before putting new files, excessive fragmentation can cause unstable video and sometimes dropouts, I use external eSata drives, and just copy the drive I want to defrag to a clean drive, the operating system copies file by file, alot faster than trying to defrag a large disk.

[Vince Becquiot]

Yes, you should defragment your drives, there may have been issues in the Win Me days, what wasn’t an isue with Win Me ?

Here’s the painless way to do it, especially if you have many, many drives as most of us do:

https://www.pcmech.com/howto/article/18/

Just let your PC do the work at night.

Vince

[Tim Kolb]

I defrag video drives when they need it…never had an issue.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Captlu]

The safest way to defrag your disk is to not defrag. Especially large files.
SO what to do?
First thing to remember is to never have all files on 1 partition. If you have a 300 gig HD, break it into 100 and 200 gig. If you want to defrag the 100 gigs, move all the files to the 200 partition and format the 100 gig side, then move it all back. This will create a new format table and will place the files in an efficient order.
NOTE: you cannot do this with your operating system partition or partition that contains program files. I am talking about storage drives mainly.

As for the 200 gig side, you can also have an external hard drive, transfer to that drive and then format the 200 gig side.

This advice is coming from a 10 year Computer Service Engineer. If you only knew how many hard drives I have seen fail due to defraging. I personally rarely do it, I would rather deal with the micro seconds slower data transfer times. Has anyone ever really noticed a performance boost after defrag? Or is the fact that our files are all jumbled and disorganized drive us humans crazy?

Defraging your operating system and program files drive is fairly safer, in my opinion.

[Michael Ebert]

We defrag our Medea RAID religiously. Otherwise, our MPEG-2 encodings from Premiere include dropped frames. Defragging cures this.

Never had any problems… but we double-backup everything on external drives anyway.

[Vince Becquiot]

Captlu,

I have never heard of defragmenting being an issue, and I’ve build quite few computers, formatting yes, especially at low level. Of course, a $50.00 hardrive is what it is, and they are doomed to fail quickly no matter what. I have quite a few Seagates here, each machine defragmented every two days on all drives, they’ve been in there for a few years now, and running at the same temp and as quiet as the day I bought them. Again, I hate to name brands here, but Western Digital and Maxtor, up until recently were quite a different story. They ditched that 4 years warranty of most of their drives, and that makes sense…

I have never actually noticed a performance boost in the OS, but Premiere sure makes good use a well organized drive, especially with you get in the Terabyte range with some uncompressed 1080.

Vince

[Tim Kolb]

[captlu] “Has anyone ever really noticed a performance boost after defrag? Or is the fact that our files are all jumbled and disorganized drive us humans crazy?”

Try editing some HD video with fragmented drives…I can live with disorganization but I can’t make a living if the video doesn’t play back.

…and 100 and 200 Gigs isn’t really the landscape here. I have .75 terabytes (3 250s plus a system drive) internally and a 3.5 terabyte fiber-channel Array externally. I generated a FILE yesterday that was 425 Gigabytes.

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Ashley M. kirchner]

[Tim Kolb] “I generated a FILE yesterday that was 425 Gigabytes.”

So Tim, exactly how do you fit that kind of file on a DVD? 🙂

[Tim Kolb]

[KirAsh4] “[Tim Kolb] “I generated a FILE yesterday that was 425 Gigabytes.”

So Tim, exactly how do you fit that kind of file on a DVD? :)”

Digital crowbar. 🙂

Actually because of a weird workflow i have for this one job, I have to export very long timelines of DV embedded in an 800×600 interface for playback on computer. When I take the uncompressed file and compress it to the client spec in QuickTime, it is much more manageable, but that intermediate step is a trip…

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Daggamut]

Many of us use Steve Gibson’s GRC.com for “Shields Up”, the security website that allows checking a firewall for leaks to hackers. But Steve’s main stock-in-trade is his disk utility “Spin-Rite” which is hard disk troubleshooter that is almost magical in it’s ability to diagnose and repair hard disk problems. It’s EXTREMELY important to run error checking before defragging a disk, since defragging always writes over areas that could be recovered prior to the defrag. Standard defrag programs like Diskkeeper Pro and Perfect Disk often just use the cli utility chkdsk for checking before defragging.

Take a look at this website and look for the podcast area where there are several free podcasts on how the Spin-rite software works and why it’s better than the usual chkdsk /f for fixing disk problems.

It will recover just about anything, plus find problems in the making waaaaaaaaay before any other disk utility I’ve found. It’s rumored to be the tool of choice for many of the top $$$ disk recovery businesses. But you must use it BEFORE attempting huge volume defrags!

Disclaimer: No connection whatsoever with GRC, but have had many long nights of wishing I had backed up/ diagnosed/ done things differently. 🙂