Frustration is taking over

[hufnagel]

ku71:

I believe I can shed some light on the subject of fragmentation of clusters.
NTFS was built to help minimize fragmentation of files, but ONLY when the size of the file is known ahead of time; say when you're copying a file or open a new one with a fixed size to start with. Any kind of application that is recording streams (like Sage) obviously cannot know ahead of time how much space will be required. As such the file system will only allocate one (1) cluster at a time. If you have more than one stream being recorded simultaneously, you will literall have the streams intermixed on the disk. This is a precise case of 'sequential cluster in a non sequential location on disk'. There's really not much that can be done about this, short of the application requesting a chunk of space ahead of time and reserving it for usage. This could cause other kinds of problems for those who use multiple PVR boards simultaneously, as it can create excessive thrashing or seeking of the heads on the disk as you jump back and forth between the reserved spaces. As perverse as it may sound, having multiple streams horribly fragmented during recording is actually better than trying to keep them contiguous!

There is one way I discovered you can keep multiple stream files from fragmenting as much when recording multiple streams simultaneously... having multiple hard disks of equal size listed as storage points for Sage. In my case it appeared to evenly distribute the recording load across disks, and in several instances recorded shows to seperates disks simultaneously.

-- John