Posted by Mike O'Sullivan on 03/01/06 17:39

Gordon Burditt wrote:
>
> Video recorders CAN (not saying they DO, but they CAN) deal with
> fragmentation in ways that computers can't. The often know ahead
> of time how big the recording is going to be (approximately, even
> though compression might be somewhat variable). Even if the user
> starts recording with no timed stop, half an hour or an hour is a
> pretty good guess. If it tries to allocate in half-hour chunks,
> (freeing up extra if there is unused space when the recording stops)
> there will be a lot less fragmentation than if it allocates in 8k
> chunks. A halfway decent filesystem can be defragged like this:
> Delete everything you can.
> A reasonable file system will recombine adjacent deleted chunks
> into a single bigger deleted chunk.
>
> It's hard to do with video recorders, but the extension of this is:
> - Delete anything you don't need.
> - Back up everything left.
> - Delete everything.
> - (optional) rebuild the filesystem from scratch.
> - Restore everything.
>

Useful info. Thanks for that.

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