[MacDV] Re: more about the inutility of defragmenting an OS X FS.

[Michael Winter]

On Dec 31, 2003, at 3:23 PM, James Asherman wrote:

> I',
> m
> not stupid. I know how a disc works and what are the illusions and 
> what are the realities.
>  The reality is we need 10's of gigs all ina row so that we miss not 
> 1/60th of a second of video looking for someplace new to put it.

The only time I've ever had iMovie report that the hard drive was too 
slow was when the internal drive of an iMac DV (450 MHz G3) was down to 
~500 MB and hadn't been defragged in ages. I could literally hear that 
one coming -but I just needed a few more seconds....

I can capture video to an external FW drive while simultaneously 
copying files from that drive to my internal drive. Yes, the copy takes 
longer, but I don't miss a frame (that's using a G4, haven't tried it 
on the iMac).

I know this may sound heretical, but IMO capturing DV is not that much 
of a stress on hard drives these days. Fragmentation alone simply isn't 
going to cause you to drop frames. If even an old iMac can do it, and 
an old, 5400 rpm drive in a first generation FW enclosure can do it 
without problems...

  If you're actually getting dropped frames, I'd seriously start looking 
elsewhere for problems.

And other than exporting to DV, any other types of operations I do take 
longer than "real time", so the hard drive speed is pretty irrelevant 
there as well.

-Mike