Posted by DWalker on 03/08/06 23:08

"J Brockley" <jbrockley@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:du68o0$ofn$1@lust.ihug.co.nz:

> You'll probably find the minimum cluster size is a lot larger than on
> a PC so fragamentation is probably not an issue. If you think about
> it unlike a PC this drive only has to hold in the order of 100 files.
> I suspect a test would be to record heaps of 5 minute clips and see
> when it runs out. You might find there are not that many clusters.
>
> Panasonic hints at this with on a
> "Mike O'Sullivan" <mike@nowhere.com> wrote in message
> news:46lv22Fb765qU1@individual.net...
>> Having used a Panasonic hard disc recorder for some months and making
>> full use it its' editing facilities it occurs to me that there is no
>> facilty for de-fragging the HD. Is this an issue that could cause
>> problems, as computer hard discs need de-fragging frequently?
>
>

Personally I think defragging computer hard disks is overrated. If your
computer disk is severely fragmented, reading a large file sequentially
will be slightly slower -- but not much slower if your disk drive has
low seek times. I do defrag once in a great while, using Raxco Perfect
Disk to put all the boot-time files together which helps my boot time
*slightly*.

But file systems are designed to work even when the files and free space
are fragmented. The hype put out by the defrag vendors that say you'll
get tremendously better performance (or implying that it's a
requirement) by defragging, are way overblown. I don't agree that
computer hard disks "need" defragging at all, much less "frequently".
It does look pretty, though, to see the nice before and after pictures
of the disk sectors, but that's just our human desire for neatness and
order. Crashes are never caused by fragmented files.

Since there is no user-visible way to defrag a DVR disk drive, it seems
clear that it's not required. The free sectors might be noncontiguous,
but they will still be available for recordings to be made.

David Walker

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