How often should I defrag sage?

[deadtoaster2]

This might be a dumb question but I am just wondering. After recording and deleting about 5 or 6 shows (which can easily be done in 1 night) I run diskeeper and it says the drive needs to be defragmented. SO I run the fragmenter and about 5 shows later diskeeper says it needs to be done again.

In reality how often should it be defragmented, if at all? Does it really improve speed or reliability?


Also another question while I'm already typing... how often should sage be restarted?

When I first set up my box I did it weekly but recently its been going longer and longer without problems (not that it had problems before) but what is the optimal time to wait before restarting?

Thanks for all the help

[phantomfsoc]

As long as your drive for recordings is formated with 64k clusters, you shouldn't have to defrag at all. I do defrag mine once in a blue moon but only out of bordom. I have gone over a year with out defragging and there has never been any slow down or speed up.
As for restarting sage.... Its a marathon. Let it go as long as you can. There really is no need to shut it down unless you need to update or anything like that. But once in awhile you should back up your Wiz.bin and sage.properties files just in case cause thats the heart and soul of sage. Especially the WIZ.BIN file

[deadtoaster2]

Yep its 64k cluster. I will backup the wiz.bin tonight seeing as i dont have *any* backups.

Thanks again

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by phantomfsoc

As long as your drive for recordings is formated with 64k clusters, you shouldn't have to defrag at all. I do defrag mine once in a blue moon but only out of bordom. I have gone over a year with out defragging and there has never been any slow down or speed up.

I agree to disagree. Just because running 64k clusters doesn't mean fragmentation and lower HD subsystem efficiency won't occur. Whether you notice the inefficiency depends on how hard your running your Sage system. Try recording 6 high Q recordings simultaneously with 4 concurrent playback streams with and without badly fragmented HD subsystem. Personally even with 64k clusters and 7 drive RAID5 striping I defrag ever Monday morning at 6:30am, auto-runs on schedule of course.

As for restarting sage.... Its a marathon. Let it go as long as you can. There really is no need to shut it down unless you need to update or anything like that. But once in awhile you should back up your Wiz.bin and sage.properties files just in case cause thats the heart and soul of sage. Especially the WIZ.BIN file

Re-start re-boot wise while in the past I've gone months without rebooting my Sage Server or even restarting SageTV service about 6 months ago it hiccuped and needed a reboot. Since then I've gone with a somewhat overboard precaution wise and automatically reboot the Server every morning 6am. Many business IT departments routinely reboot their Servers on a schedule weekly or monthly, there's a reason. Preventative clean-up just in case Mickey Mouse decided to get hinky (I mean Microsoft).

Note: reboot not power off then back on. That you want to do as seldom as possible! Power-up the highest rate of hardware failure.