Video Capture - Minimizing HDD fragmentation

jjoshua · Post by **jjoshua** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 7:25 am

Am I doing something Wrong.?
I mean like I am using new 200G sata HDDs(hot swap) to (only) archive video and every half hour or so I find the HDD gets quite fragmented.
Is that normal.? There's nothing else on the HDDs that I'm using to archive

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 9:28 am

I presume you are using NTFS, This has a peculiar way of splitting the clusters into two with some of the system files at the start and at the middle. This means that files may be deliberately fragmented. Some defraggers show this anomaly while others conceal it from view. I know of no way of stopping this behaviour.

FYI: I always reformat (full) my video disc (as opposed to defragging it) before starting a major project.

Terry Stetler · Post by **Terry Stetler** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 10:14 am

I'm with Devil. Doing a reformat is faster and more efficient than doing a defrag.

GeorgeW · Post by **GeorgeW** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 1:27 pm

are you only archiving to that HD, or are you editing videos that are on it, and then output of the edits goes to that HD

jjoshua · Post by **jjoshua** » Wed Aug 10, 2005 6:13 pm

Yes I'm only archiving on the HD in Question and as I,ve mentioned,
this happens to a new blank HD which was just formatted.
Would using fat32 help. For every one hour of .avi that is captured(from a DV cam)to the newly formatted disc, I have to defragment for about the same amount of time or more. If that is normal or if there is no way around it, then I'm still one happy archiver. But if I'm suffering unnecessarily, would someone kindly enlighten me

John

Devil · Post by **Devil** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 7:28 am

If your files are more than a couple of gigabytes or so, then I don't think that defragging will stop some fragmentation in NTFS. Some frag is perfectly acceptable. Just think, I use RAID 0 and every video file I have is fragmented between two disks. What is not desirable is having a video file fragmented in a single disk into a myriad of bits just a few Mb each, higglety-pigglety over the place. If you start with a freshly full-formatted disk and you just save a number of poly-Gb files, I'd say ignore the minor fragmentation that may result. You probably won't improve on the results. And I would not recommend FAT32.

heinz-oz · Post by **heinz-oz** » Thu Aug 11, 2005 12:23 pm

FAT 32 is less efficient than NTFS. On top of that it has a 4GB file size limit.

jjoshua · Post by **jjoshua** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 4:42 am

going to continue defragmenting HD after capture.
I think I exagerated the time taken to defrag. It actually takes me about half the time to defrag that it takes to capture now that it is under more scrutiny.
If the file size is not an issue (none of my clips reach 4G) are there any other reasons not to use Fat32 ?

Thanks

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 4:56 am

Just a thought.
You say you are using a 200GB Hard Drive which is huge and would take ages to defrag. Have you tried partitioning it?

jjoshua · Post by **jjoshua** » Fri Aug 12, 2005 8:46 am

Like I said , it actuallt does'nt take as long to defragment as I thought (using diskeeper lite defragger-am cosidering getting perfectdisk 7)
Do you think it is better to partition the archive HD ? It's a little late for the present HD I'm using but I would consider partitioning my other HDs if I get more feedback.