Does Defragmenting help with Burning?

[tbone8]

Wasn't sure what forum would be good for this question, so I figured I would start here. Plus I kind of feel stupid asking what is probably an obvious question so newbie is probably the right place . Anyway, on to my question...

So I recently purchased a Pioneer blu-ray burner and due to the still outrageous price of BD-Rs, I decided to play around with BD-9s. I tried BD Rebuilder and was very happy with the results, but figured I would give some other programs out there a fair shake. So I created two more BD-9 file folders of the same movie usind DVDFab and AVCHDCoder. When I went to burn the files, both of them gave me a write error in ImgBurn. I am using Verbatim DL media so I had a hard time believing that was the culprit. The only other difference that I could think of that I did in my testing was that the BDRebuilder test files were stored on a different hard drive than the two that failed. So I decided to go ahead and defragment the drive that contained the files that failed and POOF, the burn was succesful.

I have never encountered issues like this before. As a matter of fact, I have burned maybe 2 or 3 coasters in all my life. BUT, I have also never burned dual layer media until I got my new burner. So maybe this is common??? Just curious if any one else has had this happen to them? Maybe this is all a fluke and the two DVDs that failed just happened to be bad. I guess that is what I'm really trying to figure because I would be pretty discouraged if I found out that Verbatim was no longer reliable media.

Thanks in advance to anyone who replies!

[lowellriggsiam]

First you are dealing with DL dvd's which seem to have a higher burn error rate and second write errors are normally recorder / dvd related (laser/speed/calibration).

[disturbed1]

Maybe this is all a fluke

Depends on how badly fragmented the drive was to begin with, and what the burning error was. A hard drive that is extremely fragmented could cause buffer under runs while burning, but I don't see it actually causing the burn to out right fail - because of the modern (10+ year old) buffer under run protection. Perhaps you had other things going on in the back ground? Try upping the buffer cache. That way if there is something else going on, the buffer will have a better chance at recovery with more data buffered.

[tbone8]

Thanks for the feedback! I was thinking the same thing but it seemed way to coincidental.

[jimdagys]

I had a DVD burn fail. After I defragmented the D drive (where the DVD folder was), I got a successful burn using the same DVD disk that had failed. I burned 30 more DVDs from the same DVD folder and all were successful burns.
Moral: First defragmenting the DVD folder helps when burning DVDs.

[Ruut]

Especially in cases of high fragmentation (or lots of small files) the best practice is to make an image first, save it on another (defragmented) drive and then burn the image. It takes only a few minutes more, but the result is perfect!

[tbone8]

Just thought I would close this dicussion in case anyone stumbled upon it looking for an answer...Lowellrigsiam nailed it. My case was total write speed related. I was (am) fairly new to imgburn so I didn't quite realize the usefullness of AWS. Once I set a max write rate on my DL discs, all was good. I highly doubt the defragmenting solved the problem, but i supose anything is possible. My discs started burning at rates higher than they were rated which is what led me to resolve my issue.

[neomaine]

Especially in cases of high fragmentation (or lots of small files) the best practice is to make an image first, save it on another (defragmented) drive and then burn the image. It takes only a few minutes more, but the result is perfect!

+1

[lordsmurf]

Fragmentation can hinder burning, yes.
The write speed can surpass the ability for the drive to seek and make available all the bits and pieces of the file.
Data transfer 101, easy stuff.