Defragging mythos?

Pretorius

New Member
I've heard from several sources that defragging a drive with thousands of media files on it can result in noticable glitches and missing frames upon playback.

I wouldn't give too much credence to any of the sources, but I'm nonetheless reluctant to go ahead and defrag. I have a 108 Gb drive almost full with music and video files. I can think of little worse than having all those files permanently screwed up, but the drive is heavily fragmented and is becoming atrociously slow to respond.

Is there any veracity to those claims? Can a routine defrag leave glitches in audio tracks?
 

Flash_AAA

New Member
There are programs out their that will defrag you harddrive if you uncomfortable with Xp's. I've never heard anything against defragging though and found nothing with search engine.
 

4W4K3

VIP Member
I use Executive Software Diskkeeper...never had a problem with my mp3's or other audio. And i defrag about once a month if not more.
 

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
Ive not encountered problems with defragging unless there was a power out or something etc. but seriously, for 90% of people, defragging will over what, a 5% performance gain? Even with, say 10,000 mp3s ... defragging speeds up loadtimes by an entire 2seconds? :)
 

Pretorius

New Member
Praetor said:
Ive not encountered problems with defragging unless there was a power out or something etc. but seriously, for 90% of people, defragging will over what, a 5% performance gain? Even with, say 10,000 mp3s ... defragging speeds up loadtimes by an entire 2seconds? :)

So what would you suggest to speed up the load times?
 

4W4K3

VIP Member
Pretorius said:
So what would you suggest to speed up the load times?

lol...get faster hardware? if you've maxed out your overclock and tweaked your OS and its still too slow...its usually time to get faster hardware.
 

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
So what would you suggest to speed up the load times?
Not to turn the computer off then you wont have to load Windows. For MP3s, load them up once and use the pause button (or even load them into a RAM drive). Seriously, I dunno, I guess at one point I had the notion that 3seconds here, 2 seconds there actually mattered so I guess anything short of a RAID3 SCSI setup or fancy NAS/SAN setup anything you do (even those fancy configs) wont give you anything more than 10 seconds here and there. If you want to get the most performance without buying new hardware, I guess defraggin is the route to go and it does give gains but I guess just realize that putting in an hour or two to defrag a drive thoroughly will only result in a few seconds of improved performance (and that as soon as you access it you start the fragmentation process again)
 

4W4K3

VIP Member
Praetor said:
but I guess just realize that putting in an hour or two to defrag a drive thoroughly will only result in a few seconds of improved performance

hours? maybe its just my drive but it only takes about 10 mins to defrag it. its a WD 80GB 7200RPM...not the fastest thing in the world either. maybe its just some of the settings or sumthin.
 

Praetor

Administrator
Staff member
hours? maybe its just my drive but it only takes about 10 mins to defrag it. its a WD 80GB 7200RPM...not the fastest thing in the world either. maybe its just some of the settings or sumthin.
Maybe a tad of the top there with "hours" but ive seen a several-hour-defrag before ('course we thrashed that drive to crap too) .... 10 minutes is a tad on the light-end i would think for most people.
 
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