My mind is fragmenting!

[davlan]

Been working with digital video recently and I was having problems with video and audio data staying in sync. Both were stuttering rather annoyingly.

I decided to try defragmenting the audio drive. I had to leave the machine over night, but in the moring the problem had disappeared. I am tempted to do this on a regular basis.

Does anyone know if this is harmful to the machine?

[john]

Hi Dave

Good to see you!

De-fraging your drives regularly is very good idea. Fragmented files, as you noticed can heavily impact the performance of your PC. For streamed files, audio or video, this can be very noticable.

Basically, as you open, edit and save files, they can become split over various parts of your hard disk, instead of being stored in one contiguous block. This makes your hard disk work very hard, and bad fragmentation can make streaming data impossible.

So, defrag regularly!

Cheers

John

[Steve]

I defrag about once a week after noticing some serious problems with a few tracks of audio in cakewalk. I've heard some tales of woe but have never experienced any problems myself. I think for audio and video, it is essential!

[john]

Hey Steve

The main problem with Defrags is when there is too little room left on your drive. Basically there's not enough memory to do the defrag properly, so it goes very very very slowly.

So delete all your unwanted and temp files before a defrag!

Cheers

John