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robin sutherland
Guest
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 Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:20 am Post subject:
Defrag program |
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hello.
I have read a few places that the built in defrag program in XP not so
great for audio drives? Just wondering whether this is true, if so what
would be more suited?
cheers,
robin
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Scott Dorsey
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:42 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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Richard Crowley <richard.7.crowley@intel.com> wrote:
| Quote: | "robin sutherland" wrote ...
I have read a few places that the built in defrag program in XP not so
great for audio drives? Just wondering whether this is true, if so what
would be more suited?
Did they say WHY? Else it sounds like nonsense to me.
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I know there are some defragmenters that run silently in the background
while you're doing other work. That could be a bad thing for audio.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis." |
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Richard Crowley
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:42 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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"robin sutherland" wrote ...
| Quote: | I have read a few places that the built in defrag program in XP not so
great for audio drives? Just wondering whether this is true, if so what
would be more suited?
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Did they say WHY? Else it sounds like nonsense to me. |
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Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:42 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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Urban myth. Any defrag problem that defragments the disk is OK. There
are specialized apps that try to interleave audio files, but it's
poppycock IMO.
Mike
http://www.MusicIsLove.com |
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Ben Bradley
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:42 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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On 31 Oct 2005 15:20:34 -0800, "robin sutherland"
<robingsutherland@gmail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | hello.
I have read a few places that the built in defrag program in XP not so
great for audio drives? Just wondering whether this is true, if so what
would be more suited?
|
Look through the RAP archives on Google, I've seen defrag
discussed. It's not that the XP defrag is 'worse' than others, it's
that doing a defrag (ANY defrag program) on audio recordings may
DECREASE disk performance verses not doing a defrag. If you record
many tracks at once, the sectors of the different tracks at any one
time will be written sequentially, and will be read back that way when
you play the tracks back. If you defrag, each track file will have its
own place on disk, and the drive head will have to seek to each file
to get the sector for the corrsponding track, making it seek back and
forth between the areas of the different files to play back all tracks
at once. At least that's how I recall the explanation.
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Joe Kesselman
Guest
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| Posted:
Tue Nov 01, 2005 5:42 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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| Quote: | Did they say WHY? Else it sounds like nonsense to me.
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Sounds like myth.
Some old defraggers didn't understand how to deal with interleaving
sectors properly, and so didn't always arrange the file for fastest
sequential access. But that's been pretty darned well understood for
many years now, and I'd be somewhat surprised if Microsoft's toy got
that significantly wrong.
(Also, given that most disks now carry good-sized read-ahead buffers,
micro-optimizing sector-to-sector delay is much less of an issue than it
used to be.) |
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Pete J
Guest
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| Posted:
Wed Nov 02, 2005 1:27 am Post subject:
Re: Defrag program |
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| Quote: | Looking back at a September thread, yes, that was noted and is an
interesting and intuitively reasonable concern with defragmentation.
So...any market for a plugin which reprocesses a set of files from a
multitrack session into optimally interleaved geometry on the disk? (Or
just a caution to get a machine that can handle the file I/O for any
reasonable organization of the data on the disk....)
dhs
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Didn't the AnalogX guy write a disk "interleaver" to address this very
thing? Not as plugin but a counterpart to a defrag application.
With due respect to the pursuit of squeezing a little more performance
out of what you have to work with, I have found that most PCs with
performance problems have issues other than a fragmented (or perfectly
linear!) hard drive. Having said that, I did once solve a stuttering
session problem by unloading some data off the drive and using XP's
built in disk manager to defrag.
I can't imagine an app like what we're talking about being very
effective until you're done overdubbing and ready to mix. But at that
point, you know what would be cool? A session file prep tool included
with your DAW software. It could make a copy of a session and
interleave the audio files according to your buffer settings or
something. Then again, a few judicious submixes could accomplish a
similar performace gain...
-Pete |
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