disk defrag for finalcut

[Matthew Brunn]

Why do you want to defrag your drive? Are you finding performance problems? I do not defrag my media drives. If you have slow drives and aren’t up to the challenge of video, you really need to get faster drives.

From my experience Norton is not good for 10.4 or higher. That being said I the only maintenance I do is verify permissions and format my media drives every so many projects, about twice a year.

You can use Norton on your FCP system but the real question to me is why? What are you noticing to warrant it?

Hope this helps-
Matthew
Dual 500 G4
OSX 10.3.9
Ram 1.38
FCP 4.5/AE 6.5/DVDSP3

[Dave The drummer]

No. I have not been experiensing any problems. I just thought it would be a good idea. I think you have a better idea of formatting the media drives once a year.

Sometimes the media drive cannot keep up on 10 bit playback. It is not due to defrag though. It did that from day one.

Speaking of faster drives: I am using AJA KONA 2 with a Lacie firewire drive. I’ve heard talk of using GRaid because it is much faster. IT is not listed aas compatible with AJA Kona 2 card. Do know of faster media drive solutions for FCPro with AJA Kona 2?

[Drizzt_g]

I don’t see why the G-Raid wouldn’t be compatible with the Kona 2. Anyway if you want a faster drive you have to go with SATA drives or FiberChannel drives. FW drives are good, but they have their limits, especially if you have more than one 10bit stream at the same time.

[Matthew Brunn]

If your doing SD 10 bit spend the money and go SCSI. Cheaper than Fiber channel and will keep up with your media requirements. Not sure how much “faster” G-raid are, 800Mb Firewire is 800. Just limiting on footage bandwidth. Someone that owns G-raids and LaCie needs to answer that one. I’ve used G-raids but didn’t notice any “performance” difference.

Hope this helps-
Matthew
Dual 500 G4
OSX 10.3.9
Ram 1.38
FCP 4.5/AE 6.5/DVDSP3

[Jeff Carpenter]

You guessed right…the best way is to do it when you have a chance to erase all the media on the drive.

Use Disk Utility (APPLICATIONS>UTILITIES) and simply erase the disk. Open the extra options and select “ZERO ALL DATA.”

This will take every little bit on the drive and flip it to “0” so the entire drive is the same. You can’t get much more degragged than that!

I agree with the other posters that this probably isn’t something to worry about too much, but yeah, if I’m ever between two big jobs and I can clear the drive off I’ll do this every now and then, just to be safe.

[Will Salley]

There is no need to defrag any drive if using OS 10.3.9 or higher. Apple has a good article here:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

[Dave Mac]

Will,

Thanks for the article link.

However, if you read towards the bottom of the article it does mention that you may benefit from third-party disk optimization/defragging utilities when using large video files.

That article is somewhat outdated. Also, it doesn’t go into enough detail about drives beyond the startup disk or, more specifically, heavy use for video editing.

In reality, keeping your media files defragmented and located in the faster portion of the hard drive does make a difference. As others have said, copying or backing up media files, erasing a drive/volume, then copying/restoring the media files would have the same effect.

I use both DiskWarrior and TechTools Pro and haven’t experienced any issues.

A good scheme may be to put captured media on a separate disk/volume from your scratch/render files. Captured media doesn’t change much, so once it’s “optimized” (by any of the suggested methods), the drive/volume should perform well. More significant performance benefits may be seen by keeping the volume/drive where your scratch/render files are stored “optimized.” Using faster drives, or a RAID, and not filling up the drive beyond 60 to 80 percent may have the most beneficial affect on disk performance.

For more info, you may want to check out “Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System” by Sean Cullen, et al.