Fragmenting on HD--why?

[insaprsr]

Seems whenever I work with large avi files or anything to do with dvd, I soon need to defragment my HD. Am using Tmpgenc plus, Tmpgenc DVD Author, DVD Decrypter, Edit Studio 4, and a canopus advc-100 for analog to digital capture. PC is win XP pro Athlon 64 3500+. Defragging takes a long time and is a nuisance. Possible I am doing something wrong?

[waheed]

When defraggmenting, close as many programs as you can thats running in the backround. Try defraggmenting in safe mode and leave it running overnight if that helps.

You dont need to defrag too often. Maybe once every few months.

[insaprsr]

Waheed, thanks, that is good advice, but what I am really asking is:

Why, when I strart with a defragmented HD, as soon as I work on a large video file, and I do a windows defrag analysis, it shows lots of 'red areas' and says 'time to defrag'. How come?

[edDV]

Waheed, thanks, that is good advice, but what I am really asking is:

Why, when I strart with a defragmented HD, as soon as I work on a large video file, and I do a windows defrag analysis, it shows lots of 'red areas' and says 'time to defrag'. How come?

NTFS seems more willing to fragment large files even when there is plenty of free space. It shouldn't be a problem unless you see huge numbers of small fragments in the analysis. That usually happens more as the partition fills.

As you "work on a file", scratch files and fragments build up.

Keep captures separate from the OS drive if possible. If a laptop, at least make a capture partition. This will simplify defragmenting.

[jimmalenko]

Seems whenever I work with large avi files or anything to do with dvd, I soon need to defragment my HD. Am using Tmpgenc plus, Tmpgenc DVD Author, DVD Decrypter, Edit Studio 4, and a canopus advc-100 for analog to digital capture. PC is win XP pro Athlon 64 3500+. Defragging takes a long time and is a nuisance. Possible I am doing something wrong?

No, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. Your output from your ADVC-100 is DV-AVI, which is roughly 13GB per hour, then your output from TMPGEnc Plus is probably either a 4.3GB or 7.9GB MPEG-2 file or thereabouts, then your output from TMPGEnc DVD Author is either a 4.3GB or 7.9GB VIDEO-TS folder. So if your hard drive is say 80GB (Hint: update your computer details in your profile), then you're gonna eat up this space pretty quickly. So for a two hour cap to DVD, it's quite possible that you're using anywhere between 34-42GB of hard drive space.

I've got a batch file I've set up that defrags in commandline mode and shuts down the PC, so I run that the night before I'm planning on doing caps and it defrags overnight then shuts the PC down for me, so it's ready to roll the next day.

Here's the code:

@echo off
defrag.exe c: -f -v >> C:\logs\defrag_c.txt
cd\windows
shutdown.exe -s -f -t 0

This will write a log file as well, so you can check at a later time to see exactly what the defrag did.