How often do you guys defrag your drives

[PhillJones]

I did a clean instal a couple of months back and everything had been fine.

I had an HTPC moment at the weekend when a cable to a media storage drive came loose causeing the PC to hang and refuse to reboot. I eventually got to the bottom of it and decided to deep scan and defrag all my drives while I was at it, just for the fun of it.

Despite the fact that I'd never unistalled or deleted anything from the system drive, it still claimed to need a defrag, which I though was odd but I defraged it and every other drive.

Now sage runs much better and is much more responsive. so I have two questions.

1) How can a system drive which never gets altered become fragmented like that?
2) How often to you defrag both system and storage drives?

[Humanzee]

don't know about 1, but I defrag my recording drives daily using diskkeeper. The system drives and long term storage drives I defrag once every 3 days. going on 4 years 24/7 with out a disk failure.

One thing to note, if you do commercial detecting, stream correction etc. you want to disable those automated processes for the hours that you expect to be defragmenting. It can cause problems. I rarely record anything in the early and mid mornings so I set mine to defrag each drive sequentially for one hour starting at like 6:00am. Some folks say that that much extra work will shorten the life of a disk. The way I see it, if a file is defragmented, it won't need to be defragmented in the future. Therefore there is more contiguous space for new files, which in the end should equate to less overall seek time. Works for me. + for what ever reason new recordings seem to be fragmented like crazy even with an empty disk, so I defrag regularly. I too notice better performance with a tidy drive.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

1) How can a system drive which never gets altered become fragmented like that?
2) How often to you defrag both system and storage drives?

I've never defragged either. I think I'm to years of uptime on both and no problems whatsoever (64k clusters on the recording drive of course).

[rickgillyon]

Never...

[ybrew]

Which brings up my question.

I rebuilt my server. I moved my recordings to newer larger 500g sata drives.

I forgot to format w/ 64K clusters. I chose the default (4K).

Short of reformatting, how do I fix that?

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by PhillJones

1) How can a system drive which never gets altered become fragmented like that?

There's no such thing as a system drive that never gets altered. The OS is constantly writing log files, creating and deleting temp files for various purposes, etc. Even if you do nothing but install software, the installers unpack themselves into temp directories that get deleted when the installer exits. Just booting up your machine will cause some small degree of fragmentation.

Originally Posted by PhillJones

2) How often to you defrag both system and storage drives?

I have Diskeeper set to run nightly on all my drives, including recording drives. If you format your recording drives using 64K clusters, then you don't really need to defrag them.

Originally Posted by ybrew

Short of reformatting, how do I fix that?

You don't. Changing the cluster size is by definition a reformat.

There might be tools that can reformat in place, without wiping out the data. I believe PartitionMagic used to be able to do this, but I haven't tried the more recent versions since it was bought by Symantec. Many people seem to like Acronis, but I've had bad experiences with their (alleged) tech support and can't recommend them personally.

[Paul H]

My MediaServer is set to defrag all my drives every Sunday night starting at one AM.

[waltraud]

You need to get something like Acronis Disk Director to change the blocksize without loosing your data.

On the subject of defragging:
never

[Paul H]

I use Norton PartitionMagic.

[davephan]

Once a week with Raxio PerfectDisk.

Dave

[camus]

Never.

Partion Magic will change clusters with data in place, but if you are afraid of losing anything I would still back it up.

[ybrew]

I think I may just try it with acronis.

Worst case is I lose recordings. They're only TV after all.

[Oats]

I defrag the system drive in all my computer every night, including the Sage PC. I never defrag the recording drive or my DVD storage drives.

[paulbeers]

Never, My server always says I need to degraf my Sage files which makes sense since at any point in time I could be recording 6 video streams (rarely do I do more than 3, but during primetime I am generally recording at least 2 shows) and that means that every video "stream" is going to naturally be fragmented. I would have to defrag every night and I just don't see the point. My OS drive never needs to be defragged since nothing is ever added or deleted to that drive which makes sense (okay never isn't completely true, but very rarely anyway).

[AWS]

I use Diskeeper, too. It's set to "all day, all times". Never had a problem. Been using that method for years.

AWS

[stevech]

some argue that for 64K block partitions (commonly used for big mpg files), defrag isn't very important. I dunno.

[dvd_maniac]

about twice a year.
I delete everything on my recording drive almost daily and store archived videos onto another hard drive which I almost never delete anything off of it.
All drives are formatted with 64k except OS partition. I defrag that about 4x a year.

I defrag out of boredom as I've never experienced any problems on my Sage Server and notice no improvement afterwards either.

[PhillJones]

That's some pretty varied answers then. Everything from never to everynight.

There were several disk maintainance programmes listed above. What's wrong with good old windows defrag and the task scheduler?

[GKusnick]

As I recall, the defragmenter that ships with Windows is a stripped-down version of Diskeeper. Nothing wrong with it, but the retail version has some additional features, including a mode that allows it to run continuously in background with minimal impact on other running programs. You can also schedule blackout periods when you don't want it to run.

[stevech]

seems like defragging can become a compulsive disorder!