Re: Disk Defrag in MCE environment

"Pete Delgado" <Pete@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:epCsxaKYFHA.3840@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Feel free to do whatever you like. I am not here to contradict you, I
> just wanted to correct your error.
>
No error. No correction required. I did not say the segments *would* be
contiguous, only that they might be. As I have truckloads of free space
(650GB installed) there is always plenty of room for files to be written in
an orderly fashion. In any case, it's a moot point when my fragments occur
only every few minutes within a recording rather than several times per
second.

> Certainly you are correct that defragging adds additional wear to the disk
> and heads, but I disagree with your generalization that there is no useful
> performance gain. The "correct" answer seems to me to be "it depends" as
> it is dependant upon disk size, amount of free space, number of files,
> number of fragments, distance between fragments etc.
>
How can you get a useful performance gain on watching a recorded TV
programme? Either it plays back smoothly or it doesn't. If it doesn't then
defrag by all means. If playback is fine then what is to be gained,
performancewise? Can you suddenly watch TV any faster? Would you want to? My
system will quite happily record and play back live TV while copying/moving
completed recordings off to my main media disk. IOW there is absolutely no
performance issue with my disks or the files as they are presently
organised.

But you're right, it does all depend. But if you're worried about
fragmentation then I would certainly recommend sticking those huge TV
recordings in their own partition, away from everything else.

> If you don't defrag, I would expect that the recordings that you make as
> your disk fills up will become increasingly more fragmented than those you
> made when the disk was clean. Would it be enough to make a performance
> difference? Probably not unless the fragmentation is extreme.
>
Which is pretty much my point. I've had my MCE PC since last December and
based on my own experience no longer feel the need to defrag my recorded TV
partition(s) at all. But I do defrag the system partition every couple of
weeks or so.

For people with twin tuners or those who insist on mixing up multi-GB files
with little itty-bitty files in the same partition then I quite accept that
perhaps the balance of need changes. No biggy either way. My approach works
for me. I'm sure yours does for you :-)

The original purpose of this thread was, I thought, to determine whether the
XP defragger works. Well in my experience it certainly does. How judiciously
you use it is another matter. But nobody should expect it to be quick with
huge data volumes and colossal files.


.

Relevant Pages

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  • Re: os x newbie: partitioning?
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