hard drive getting worse running pulldown & burning??

[defense]

I have two quick questions. One, how often should a person on "average" run disk defragment when they are using tools such as most of us to backup movies? I haven't defraged since I've joined and started backing up movies, so it's been about 4 months or so. I will defragment either tonight or tomorrow, but my questions are, 1) How often should a person on average who does the type of stuff we do run defragment? And

2) Can anyone tell me if they think the hard drive noise I'm getting is because I need a defragment?...I've noticed that sometimes when i'm running pulldown,..pulldown will go through hundreds of frames a second and will be done in 5 minutes or less. But other times it will either start out at about 15 frames per second, then speed up to hundreds of frames per second, and then back to 15 frames per second. Is this normal?

Do other people see the same with pulldown or do most just have pulldown ALWAYS run through hundreds of frames per second without a hitch?

And the last thing I've started noticing, or didn't notice before, is that my hard drive usually blinks every second or so right along in unison with my Sony DRU500a when burning. But I've started to see that SOMETIMES my hard drive WHILE BURNING will start making a loud noise EXACTLY the same noise it makes when Maestro is "COMPILING" a project, and the light stays solid, but my SONY continues to blink at the same normal speed...then after a few minutes my hard drive goes back and blinks off and on in unison with the Sony Burner until the project is complete. Other times when I burn the ENTIRE burn has the two lights usually blink at the same time, but as I said, SOMETIMES my hard drive does that as if it's gathering information.

I have NEVER had any playback issues or any other issues when watching a movie after the hard drive has done that..but can anyone explain to me why it does that and if it is normal? Thanks in advance

[marvel2020]

M8 you should defrag as much as you harddrive needs it, i remember i was like you.

I was doing the excact same as you are now, then things started to slow down, so i use to defrag at least 3 times a week, sometimes even more if i was doing a lot of back ups.

Now on average it will be once a week because all i'm doing is Converting capture's from TV to DVD and a that's at weekend's.

So Monday is always my defrag day, but that still doesn't stop me from checking it time to time just in case .

[defense]

So Monday is always my defrag day, but that still doesn't stop me from checking it time to time just in case

sounds interesting, thanks for the info. Then I guess I should defrag at least once a day too then. I haven't really noticed anything slowing down except pulldown as I mentioned, but I don't know if that isn't just normal because I haven't heard anyone say that they ALWAYS get hundreds of frames per second while running pulldown.

Anyway, quick question marvel, do you run scandisk BEFORE you defrag? I remember defragn'g in Millenium was a nightmare, but that entire OS is a nightmare. I guess it's probably good if I at least run a surface scan, then run defrag, and continue to do it once a week. See how everything goes from there. Thanks for the info. If anyone can tell me if pulldown does the same for them as for me, I'd appreciate it. Also, if anyone knows about the hard drive thing I mentioned above, i'd like to know about that too if anyone knows. Thanks