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

[James Asherman]

On Wednesday, December 31, 2003, at 02:02  PM, Mark M. Florida wrote:

> 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.
Right
>  (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.
right again
>
> So...  While it's probably not necessary to defrag/optimize your hard 
> drive every day, or even every week,
about every six weeks.
>  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!

What would you use. Lousy Drive10?

>
> 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.

I do exactly that but occasionaly there is overflow that must have 
somewhere to go.
And personal projects nearly always end up on the startup drive.

>  Nothing defrags a drive like a good formatting...  ;-)  And even if 
> you don't reformat your drive in between projects,
every few 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
>
>
and  a worthy 2p it is.
Thanks Mark
Jim