Defrag
 

Does anybody know--I mean really know--what Avid's official position is on defragging? I did a search on this and found some opinions, but nothing about what Avid says about it. I'm running Pro Tools 12.5 in a Windows 10 computer. A computer builder/repairman advised me a couple years ago that I shoujd defrag every day using Auslogics free disk defragger, no matter what I was using the computer for. I've been doing that, and my opinion is that it helps. Plus, doing it daily takes less than 5 minutes. However, I've seen some opinions expressed in this forum saying not to defrag. I even saw one that said Avid didn't recommend defragging, but they didn't refer to where Avid said that. I defrag my C drive, my D drive, and my backup F drive daily with the Auslogics defragger, but I've started to wonder if I should only do my C drive. If somebody can point me to what Avid has to say about this, I'd appreciate it.

Re: Defrag
 

Way back in I the day, like 2001 or 2002, Avid - Digidesign actually, although owned by Avid - recommended copying off the audio from the recording drive, formatting the recording drive and then copying the audio back. Have a look at this thread:

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=131971

And this one:

http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=215755

Not the first time this has been discussed.

Interestingly, a lot of Digidesign manuals did recommend defragging drives on Windows.

As to defragging a drive daily - wow, never heard that. If the drives are spinners, be sure to back the drive up before you defrag. Pieces of information are being moved around to try to make them contiguous - trying to unfragment the information a file needs. If something goes wrong...

If it's an SSD, then you need Trim/garbage collection and Windows 10 can do that.

Anyone else remember that Digidesign recommendation and/or corrections for what I said?

Re: Defrag
 

I'm no expert, but I have not defragged a drive in several years(and have no plans to). I also prefer to move a session from one drive(or partition) to another(and maybe clear out unused audio clips in the process).:o

Re: Defrag
 

Back when I ran a Windows system very often a defrag would actually perform slower/worse than before the defrag. This was using the built-in Win defrag utility. Really the best thing in whatever system (Win or Mac) is to do something that Bruce mentioned - copy the data off to a separate drive, format the original drive and copy the data back to the formatted drive. Not a defrag as such but Windows will do it's level best to copy the data of a file to contiguous blocks.

Not so sure if defrag would help let alone work with ssd's. Paging Mr. Ramm, paging Mr. Ramm.