OT: Defrag'ing Media Drives

How Often should you defrag a media drive or secondary drives?

I have a 1tb for all of my programs and the os. I have 3 firewire drives (2daisy chained) and 3 sata drives - sata1 is raid 5 (2tb), sata2 is a 4bay with 2 on raid5(1tb) and 2 jbod(2tb), sata3 is 2 jbod (2tb).

The satas have never been defrag'ed. only the main drive. I don't currently have any problems with the drives. I was wanting to know as a matter of maintenance when or how often it should be done.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

You should never defragment media drives. They work much better in a fragmented state.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

thanks

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Jon -

Can you give uis a little mor einformation why defragmenting a severely fragments drive is better? In the early days, before SAATA. when i had performance issues on FireWire drives, defragging usually solved issues like grey screens, sparklies and the like during playback demand.

I do know that Avid media drives shouldn't be defragged and I never did this to them.

Fill in a bit for us the logic behind "Never" these days? I'd sincerely like to know, because if I don't have to order Drive Rescue or TechTool Pro for Leopard, I'd be fine with that. If you'cve written an article covering this, please supply a link going a little deeper into it?

Much thanks,


- Loren

Today's FCP 7 keytip:
Play from Playhead to Out Mark with Shift-P !

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Oops... misread the original post. Ignore that.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Jon so you're saying that a media drive should be defragged?

------------------------
Dean

"When I see you floating down the gutter I'll give you a bottle of wine."
Captain Beefheart, Trout Mask Replica.