Burning Coasters due to Hard Drive Problem Please Help???

[golfnut]

I have burned many many back up copies of my DVD movies without any problem until yesterday. I burned 6 coasters. After checking everything possible I narrowed the problem down to the hard drive. Seems when I back up more than 2 DVDs in a row my hard drive needs to be defraged. Why all of a sudden would this happen. I can see defragging about every 3 or 4 days maybe but not after just backing up 2 movies. Can anyone shed any light on this or what may be wrong with my 2 month old Maxtor 160GB with 130GB of free space. Your advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

[Capmaster]

Windows uses a swapfile for space when the RAM is used up. If left in the default position, the file is dynamic - Windows is constantly changing the size of it, and this ends up scattering the file all over the HD. If you use the Windows-supplied defragger, the swapfile usually isn't optimized.

What you need to do to prevent this is to set the swapfile minimum and maximum sizes to the same size. Then Windows will not constantly resize it with demand.

Go to Control Panel>System>Advanced> Performance Options>Virtual Memory Change Button>Initial Size set to something large enough like 2GB and set the Maximum size to the exact same number. Then "OK" out of all the windows. It'll prompt to restart.

You also should have a good defragger that will optimize the swapfile, like Norton Speed Disk or Diskeeper.

When setting up the defragger, in options, if there is a place to set "Files First" on the disk like Speed Disk, add c:\pagefile.sys this will keep the swapfile at the beginning of the hard disk where seek and transfer times are the fastest.

This ought to put your fragmenting problems to rest.

And ..I'm moving this to the Computer forum.

[ViRaL1]

You might also want to consider a reboot and clearing your temp folder (%temp%) after burning a CD or two. It's possible that your system is getting bogged down with files that aren't being cleaned up properly when you burn.

[gmatov]

Personally, I don't believe for a moment that fragmentation is your problem.

You show 1 80 gig drive in your details. If it is full, except for the room needed to convert 1 DVD, then it is not dropping turds (aka, swap files) all over the place. There simply isn't room to do so.

If it is near empty, and with 80 gig, you are probably deleting files after a burn, samey-same, no prob, as there is plenty of room for a swap file, and it will not drop turds in the midst of your data files, as they will be written in a near constant stream.

I posted some time back an article from either PC Mag or PC Computing that had done a test and found absolutely NO difference in file transfer between defragged and non-defragged drives, as per data transfer rate.

You have some other problem, regardless what the "experts" tell you.

Cheers,

George

[golfnut]

Thanks guys for the replies. I need and will update my profile to show a 160 G hard drive which replaced my 80G about 2 months ago.