95+% fragmentation on recording drives

evilpenguin · #1 11-10-2005, 12:22 PM

I just did a quick check on all my recording drives and I was quite shocked to find that they all were over 95% fragmented. That's prolly not good. Here's my setup.

- Four 200 gig recording drives connected to a Promise PCI ATA controller in master/slave config. All recording drives started off as clean formats with 64k cluster size about 2 months ago.
- I have two recording sources, 1 PVR-250 and 1 Comcast Firewire STB
- The machine is a dedicated Sage Server(v3.0.11) for one Sage Client(v4.0)

Is this normal or the result of something far more sinister?

nielm · #2 11-10-2005, 12:53 PM

its normal if you don't defrag regularly...

It's not a problem if it does not impact playback (no stuttering)

Crashless · #3 11-10-2005, 01:01 PM

Mine are pretty horrible too. But like Nielm said, if it doesn't effect your recording or playback, why does it matter?

evilpenguin · #4 11-10-2005, 01:49 PM

Well, I initially checked it because I was having two strange playback problems.

1) I'll be trying to fast forward 10 seconds and, although the UI will report that I only fast forwarded 10 seconds, in reality I skipped ahead > 1-2 minutes in the movie. That is happening a lot on HD shows and occasionally on SD shows.

2) I'll be watching an HD show while it was recording and then after ~20 minutes the show will start stuttering and a few seconds later stop playing completely. After that I won't be able to watch the show at all until it finished recording. It doesn't matter if I switch decoders, restart Sage, or even restart the whole Sage Client PC.

I was just thinking that they might be related.

briands · #5 11-10-2005, 02:03 PM

Quick somewhat related question... Does a Raid 3 (or 5) require defrag? Can the OS even see the drives to tell if they are fragmented?

mike_15 · #6 11-10-2005, 02:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

1) I'll be trying to fast forward 10 seconds and, although the UI will report that I only fast forwarded 10 seconds, in reality I skipped ahead > 1-2 minutes in the movie. That is happening a lot on HD shows and occasionally on SD shows.

I had a simular problem, When I would FF the UI showed a 1min change and the video changed only a few seconds. I am unsure which solved my problem. I uninstalled sage and deleted the sage folder(backing up wiz....).
While sage was uninstalled I realized I never ran windows update on the computer since I rebuilt it a few months ago. Windows update took my XP SP1 to SP2, when asked express/custom I chose custom and I updated several of my drivers, several other updates too. Reinstalled Sage. now everything is working better than ever.

Mike

dvd_maniac · #7 11-10-2005, 02:16 PM

Yes I defrag my Raid-5 monthly. But windows defrag is WAY TOO SLOW. I have to use Diskeeper server edition because my raid set is over 1TB and the limit on regular diskeeper is 500GB.

michelkenny · #8 11-10-2005, 03:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Well, I initially checked it because I was having two strange playback problems.

1) I'll be trying to fast forward 10 seconds and, although the UI will report that I only fast forwarded 10 seconds, in reality I skipped ahead > 1-2 minutes in the movie. That is happening a lot on HD shows and occasionally on SD shows.

2) I'll be watching an HD show while it was recording and then after ~20 minutes the show will start stuttering and a few seconds later stop playing completely. After that I won't be able to watch the show at all until it finished recording. It doesn't matter if I switch decoders, restart Sage, or even restart the whole Sage Client PC.

I was just thinking that they might be related.

Why don't you defrag to see if it fixes the problem? If it doesn't, then it's something related with Sage/Java or something else.

evilpenguin · #9 11-10-2005, 03:39 PM

Way ahead of you, I've had my server defraging for the last 12 hours

I just wanted to check if this level of defragmentation was normal.

Naylia · #10 11-10-2005, 04:10 PM

you can schedule defrags to run using windows scheduler and the defrag program included with windows

i have mine set to defrag my PVR disk every third early morning 3 or 4am timeframe, that way it never gets so bad that you have a lot of fragmentation and it tends to go quickly

i also have it defrag my os drive once every other week

deria · #11 11-10-2005, 04:26 PM

I use PerfectDisk. It schedules nicely, but more importantly it works and plays well with others. Its fast, and quite configurable. It also does a nice job of moving files to their optimal locations.

Goodspike · #12 11-13-2005, 04:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crashless

Mine are pretty horrible too. But like Nielm said, if it doesn't effect your recording or playback, why does it matter?

I'm not so sure it doesn't affect playback. I've been having an issue on football games. Starting in the second quarter I get a lot of stuttering. I just checked a game today, and the file for that game had almost 5,000 fragments after roughly an hour!

IMHO, there needs to be something done about this. My other software doesn't fragment TS or TP files in that manner.

RedR · #13 11-13-2005, 06:22 PM

This really isnt a problem with the SageTV or other software writing out the files vs. the OS and having little room to work with. The best solutions is to format the drive out for 64k clusters, then schedule a task that defrags the drive. I have three drives that are cleaned up in the wee hrs of the night and mid-afternoon. This keeps things clean, as well providing a clean section for the OS to write out new shows.

Hope this helps,
RedR

Goodspike · #14 11-14-2005, 08:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RedR

This really isnt a problem with the SageTV or other software writing out the files vs. the OS and having little room to work with. The best solutions is to format the drive out for 64k clusters, then schedule a task that defrags the drive. I have three drives that are cleaned up in the wee hrs of the night and mid-afternoon. This keeps things clean, as well providing a clean section for the OS to write out new shows.

Hope this helps,
RedR

But when it severely fragments new files after defragmenting your drive, that really isn't a solution.

BTW, as to my problem I think I may have found a solution. I haven't done enough testing yet, but it might not be the length of the file, but being live that causes the stutter. I don't watch that much live TV, and typically don't get live in a game until at least an hour in. Yesterday, after posting, I discovered that if I just stayed 5 seconds back from live I was okay. I'd also closed out of Sage, however, so I need to do more testing next week.

steingra · #15 11-14-2005, 08:24 AM

I swear that I read somewhere you are not supposed to defrag 64k formatted drives in Windows OS? I dont remember why they said it. Anyone heard that before? Maybe they meant to not use Windows built in defrag program?

Naylia · #16 11-14-2005, 08:29 AM

I don't know...I use 64k cluster formatted PVR partition and windows defrag and it performs great like that. I never get any stuttering or anything :shrug:

Goodspike · #17 12-04-2005, 07:39 PM

BTW, I think I found a fix for the fragmentation issue on my system. I turned the acoustic management for the recording drive to quiet! I went from 3,000+ fragments on some files to a maximum of 5 fragments so far, and many not fragmented at all.

nielm · #18 12-05-2005, 03:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by steingra

I swear that I read somewhere you are not supposed to defrag 64k formatted drives in Windows OS? I dont remember why they said it. Anyone heard that before? Maybe they meant to not use Windows built in defrag program?

The built-in defrag in XP home cannot defrag 64K cluster drives... XP Pro has problems coping sometimes.
(Actually, copying the most fragmented files to a temp directory on the same drive, then moving it back sometimes works better than XP pro's defragger).

Naylia · #19 12-09-2005, 11:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nielm

The built-in defrag in XP home cannot defrag 64K cluster drives... XP Pro has problems coping sometimes.
(Actually, copying the most fragmented files to a temp directory on the same drive, then moving it back sometimes works better than XP pro's defragger).

XP Pro copes well if you don't let it get too fragmented/full to begin with. If the drive is extremely fragmented and full it doesn't seem to know what to do.

Mysticeti · #20 03-21-2006, 08:52 AM

Happy SageTV user here who recently started seeing more and more playblack micro skips (less than a second but clearly visable).

It had been quite some time since I'd done a defrag so I thought I'd start there as a way to resolve the playback issues.

It worked but there was a recording in progress and that show was so badly affected it was unwatchable.

My question: how can I automate defrag in such a way that it will look for a free window in the recording schedule?

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