[MacDV] Re: iMovie Camcorder Export Woes (optimization)

[Michael Winter]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2003, at 11:49  PM, Preston wrote:

>>
>> Is the optimization necessary if you have large (dual 1 Gig ) 
>> processors?
>
> Optimization has to do with how garbled and jumbled all you data is on 
> your HD.
> It has nothing to do with how fast your processor is.

Just to spell it out a bit more...

With a "fragmented" drive any given file may have parts of it scattered 
across different locations on the disk platters. When that happens, the 
drive head, which reads the data, spends most of its time "seeking" 
pieces of the file, that is it reads one part here, then has to move to 
a different part of the disk to read the next part, then to a different 
part to read the next bit....  Since moving the drive head around like 
that takes a (relatively) long time, it greatly decreases the speed at 
which the drive can send data to the computer. When this happens, 
you'll often hear the hard drive "working" or "grinding". Optimizing 
the drive simply takes all the pieces of the files and puts them 
together in one place.

So what Preston was saying is that the speed in this case is probably 
being limited by how fast data is coming off the hard drive due to the 
drive not being optimized -that's the bottleneck. Faster/more CPUs 
can't do anything to help that problem.

Sorry if this seems a bit pedantic, but the line Preston replied to 
indicated a potential misunderstanding of how things work, and I 
couldn't keep quiet.

-Mike