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

[Mark M. Florida]

In my opinion, you're both a little extreme in your views.  (check 
previous messages in this thread for reference -- too long to include)

It's certainly true that modern drive and OS technology lessens the 
need for defragging, but that's for what would be considered "normal" 
usage like e-mail, word processing, and even editing small images.  I'd 
hardly consider working with digital video "normal" usage -- capturing 
gigabytes upon gigabytes of a time-critical data stream -- your hard 
drive *must* operate at a certain level of performance or else you get 
dropped frames and longer render times.  Granted, 4 MB/sec. for DV 
isn't much these days, but over time performance could certainly 
degrade to a point where frames start getting dropped and rendering 
times increase, due to countless cycles of capturing, editing, 
rendering, deleting, etc. (not to mention all of the other things you 
do with your computer like image editing, e-mail, downloading files, 
installing software -- all of which can contribute to eventual 
fragmentation).  And even though Panther will optimize files under 20 
MB "on-the-fly", most video files are much larger than that, and will 
therefore not be optimized -- so after multiple cycles of capturing, 
editing, deleting, it is very possible there will be fragmentation, 
especially if capturing to the system startup disk which already has to 
deal with hundreds of thousands of tiny OS X system and application 
files.

So...  While it's probably not necessary to defrag/optimize your hard 
drive every day, or even every week, it's probably still a good idea to 
have some sort of maintenance routine if you do a lot of video work (or 
even edit large files with Photoshop).  I'd stay away from Norton Speed 
Disk, though -- what a hack!

My suggestion would be to have a completely separate drive *just* for 
video (or even an entirely separate partition on the same physical disk 
as your System/apps) which you can reformat periodically as projects 
are completed.  Nothing defrags a drive like a good formatting...  ;-)  
And even if you don't reformat your drive in between projects, the fact 
that your media files don't have to contend with your system and 
application files should allow things to continue to operate smoothly 
as time goes on.

That's *my* 2 cents anyway...

- Mark