defrag drives

[rqstudio]

the last sentence of my post was the clincher:

"a dedicated audio drive usually doesnt need a defrag though, unless youve also been using the drive to 'store' 'other content'."
BUT possibly scattering files around the drive isnt likely. windows is going 'tighten' the file structure on the drive, moving the files closer to one another, thus making read times faster. i understand digi doesnt recommend this, but theres many things they do not recommend that we all do everyday without problem.

Did you just make this up or didn't you read the links from Digi Spk left for you? I too experienced this the hard way and after looking in the disk allocation window realized my files WERE scattered all over the place after a defrag. Instead of grouping them together it layers them across the surface. PLEASE copy to another disk and then do a disk format!

[soulshock7]

Thanks guys. I think I'll copy my files to the other HD first then defrag the drive. I hope this helps.

[spkguitar]

Even if you are using a dedicated drive only for Pro Tools sessions the drive contains more than just large audio files. There are session files, backup session files, fade files, plug-in setting files, etc etc. Sometimes a dedicated audio drive can benefit from a "restructuring". Typically, defragment programs (especially the default windows defragmenter) won't care about the location of the files on the disk surface or what other files or programs they relate to; they just look for available free space, and will move your files all around to "tighten the file structure". This can sometimes cause problems with Pro Tools when streaming the audio from the drive, and is why Digidesign recommends not to do it.

So, to be safe, follow the Digidesign recommendation of copying the data off of the drive, reformat the drive and copy the data back.

[rqstudio]

One more thing and I think I'm right about this, (please chime in if you disagree) The best way to do this is to open the session, select File>Save as, this will open a window where you should click the buttons: save session data and audio files. This will put everything neatly onto another chosen disk.

[GeoffLee]

One more thing and I think I'm right about this, (please chime in if you disagree) The best way to do this is to open the session, select File>Save as, this will open a window where you should click the buttons: save session data and audio files. This will put everything neatly onto another chosen disk.

Do you mean 'File>Save Session Copy In'?

[nickdahl]

Even if you are using a dedicated drive only for Pro Tools sessions the drive contains more than just large audio files. There are session files, backup session files, fade files, plug-in setting files, etc etc. Sometimes a dedicated audio drive can benefit from a "restructuring". Typically, defragment programs (especially the default windows defragmenter) won't care about the location of the files on the disk surface or what other files or programs they relate to; they just look for available free space, and will move your files all around to "tighten the file structure". This can sometimes cause problems with Pro Tools when streaming the audio from the drive, and is why Digidesign recommends not to do it.

So, to be safe, follow the Digidesign recommendation of copying the data off of the drive, reformat the drive and copy the data back.

I really appreciate this information. I've been using Microsoft's defragmenter, and always thought I was doing the right thing by running the defragmenter, every time I used Pro Tools.

Now, though, I'm a little worried. Because I've "defragged" my hard drives so often with the defragger, have I torn up my audio files, and will moving them to another hard drive, reformatting the audio drive, then replacing them on the reformatted drive, "restore" the audio files to their original state?

Thanks,

Nick

[bblue]

Even if you are using a dedicated drive only for Pro Tools sessions the drive contains more than just large audio files. There are session files, backup session files, fade files, plug-in setting files, etc etc. Sometimes a dedicated audio drive can benefit from a "restructuring". Typically, defragment programs (especially the default windows defragmenter) won't care about the location of the files on the disk surface or what other files or programs they relate to; they just look for available free space, and will move your files all around to "tighten the file structure". This can sometimes cause problems with Pro Tools when streaming the audio from the drive, and is why Digidesign recommends not to do it.

So, to be safe, follow the Digidesign recommendation of copying the data off of the drive, reformat the drive and copy the data back.

Of course this is good advice generally, but I believe some additional perspective is needed.

The speed and general performance of all things (audio) workstation have increased dramatically in the last couple of years. A lot of the 'recommendations' are based on earlier Pro Tools behavior, especially with slower drives and processing power. If you're using such hardwire, especially drives, your system will be very sensitive to even minor issues. If you do follow the recommendation of a dedicated PT drive, and have a stable higher performance system (core 2 duo or higher, 7200rpm or higher drives, sata or esata), you can relax -- a lot.

Even the Windows XP defragmenter does a decent job on your filesystem IF you run it twice or more in succession. It's a two part process which first performs defragmentation (mostly leaving the files where they are, but defragmented) and then compaction which tries to pack the drive so all the files are contiguous to each other from the first data sector. However, the compaction part isn't really that aggressive and can leave holes in the allocations and scattered files. If you immediately run defrag again it won't do much (if any) further defragmentation, but will do another pass at compaction which usually packs the files pretty well. And of course there are other defrag utilities which also do a good job.

Under normal circumstances there is little difference between a good defragmentation and compaction than copying a backup filesystem back to your PT drive. Why? Because they're both arbitrary with the order of files. A full defragmention and compaction will pack all files in an arbitrary order. Copying them back puts them in a different arbitrary order -- alphabetical, usually, and not necessarily in a predictable alpha order, depending on how you click-selected them from the backup drive. So in practice it makes little difference.

Of course, if your PT drive ever shows bad sector errors, read or write errors, or warnings for any kind of i/o error related to that drive, you should definitely LOW LEVEL format it and then restore from a good backup.

Most importantly, there's no such thing as too many backups!