how often do you defrag your HD?

[glu]

When the new comp comes in within a week or two (I CANT WAIT!), I want to start off fresh and get routine about hardrive maintanence and better organization of files. Any tips or taboos? How often do you defrag your HD?

[tweakproductions]

once a month is probably good, depending on the size and how often you erase files.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

My audio drives... never... I archive them and reformat them.

Rail

[neomodo]

The word from Digidesign and from my experience working with rich media in general (Avid etc..) is that defragmenting your audio drive is not recommended. Instead, copying your audio files to another location, reformatting the audio drive and then moving everything back to the drive apparently gets you adequate results.

It sounds tedious to me however, there is a pain-in-the-butt error that occurs on some systems where the system will claim it can't read from the drive fast enough. I recently had to do battle with this issue and it drove me crazy - all my drives were in great shape, regularly defragmented, checkdisk, etc. There was no logical explanation - until I was reminded by a Digi support person about the above recommendation and he mentioned that sometimes defragmenting the drive can actually be responsible for the occurrence of this error.

Just thought I'd mention this as it is a recent experience/re-discovery I made having to do with the defragmentation process. This being the case, your other drives will want to be defragmented for sure regardless of whether or not this other thing is of significant concern or not. I would recommend that you look into a 3rd party defragmenting tool. The Microsoft supplied defrag tool is relatively adequate to a point. However it does nothing about the MFT file that exists on NTFS drives.

If you are wondering what that is the MFT (Master File Table) is basically an index file that keeps track of everything stored in your hard drive. There is at least one entry in the MFT for every file on an NTFS disk, plus the MFT itself. Each entry in the MFT contains the following data: size; time and date stamps; security attributes; and data location. Over time this tends to get fragmented and the result is poor system performance, increasingly longer file access times, and so on.

For this reason I use Diskeeper - even though Microsoft claims that by allocating 1/8 of the disk for exclusive MFT use the fact remains that it gets fragmented. The home user version of diskeeper is fairly inexpensive and it has the added benefit of letting you schedule when you want your disks defragmented and it will do it for you on whatever schedule you choose - so you never really have to think about defragmenting -

I don't work for these guys - I'm just a techie that has learned the hard way about the trials and tribulations related to fragmented data... In any case this is a link to their site - http://execsoft.com or www.diskeeper.com - their demo runs for something like 60 days fully functional.

cheers

[IntelDoc]

I do it after every session... but like Rail says. Archive and reformat is a good way. I usually do that when I start a new project.

- Doc

[bigbubbaj]

I run diskeeper every night, and have never had a problem. BUT perhaps I am in for some trouble!

[FRANCIS1]

Based on my personal experience, I recommend to never defragment the audio drives. The last time I did it, it wrecked havoc and fragmented the drive to oblivion. Some sessions were to never be recovered. Do not use Norton defragmenter, it most likely will freeze. Additionally this will in some instances lead to Norton ghost failure and to Norton GoBack to want its own exit out of your computer.

[glu]

Wow, thanks for all the input! So what correct me if I am wrong, would I copy all my audio files to my external USB hardrive, erase and reformat my computer audio drive, and then move the audio files right back?

[The Weed]

Rail, a quick question if you please. Would Ghosting my audio drive, reformatting it and then Ghosting my files back be the same as archiving, or would they be brought back from the Ghost Image fragmented?

Thanks,

[FRANCIS1]

I don't know, I one time did 2 hours worth of sessions (roughly 30GB) and everything went fine until defragmenting (luckily, I had fresh bounces). Now I try to keep small partitions, back them with Ghost on DVD, backup the session folders and the bounces, replace HDs when they're full. I don't know if "ghosting" stuff back and forth really changes anything, one would imagine it does not. Anyway, this works for me. I treat my drives a lot like tapes, except they are a lot cheaper and probably keep just as long.