wilebill
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Feb 19, 2006, 6:49 PM
Post #7 of 8
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Re: [bbalser] External drives to defrag?
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Having almost 20 years of IT engineering behind me, let me point out that defragging is old, out dated technology. Today's drives are much more self-maintining than before and defragging is pretty much a waste of time. I'm running two external FW drives, and two internal SATA drives, ranging from 250GB to 500GB. I haven't defraged any of them in over two years and have never had a system slow down or single problem. Never have had to re-format anything. Just regular MacJanitor, DiskWarrior, and Disk Utilites every other week. No problems.
If your drives are recent, within the last few short years, defraging is a thing of the past.
I'll have to disagree with that. I think a lot has to do with the NLE you use. With my VT, which is real time, if you put several layers of video on the timeline and play them all simultaneously, if the system has to look all over the drive for pieces of files to play, it WILL cause stuttering in the playback. If, however, the files are contiguous chunks, there is less seeking for files and you can have more layers of video that will play back without stutters. This, of course, depends on the complexity of the edit - it's very capable of playing two or three layers even with a badly fragged disc, but as it gets more complex the effects of fragmented files becomes more apparent.
I can see where your statement would be true for systems that render, since it will only render as fast as it can find the files, and as fast as the computer's specs will allow. But to make a blanket statement that no one should ever have to defrag is misleading at best.
I may be obsessive about it, but I run fast computers with lots of memory and fast SCSI drives with my video files on them. I defrag my drives once a week. When I have a client looking over my shoulder, I want to be assured that when I hit the VT's play button, I don't have to give them any excuse as to why the video won't play back properly. So far in 3 years of using the VT I haven't had to do that. I just look at it like a tune-up, I like to keep things in perfect working order.
Regards,
Billy Horton
Video Image Productions
Studio & On-Location Video Production
2 NewTek VT[4.6] Editing Suites
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