I just got Cubase 5 and as I'm going through the getting started manual, it has an exclamation point about how critically important it is to have your hard drive defragmented for audio production. I have never paid much attention to defragging and always felt the benefit was minimal. How important is it really and what negative effects would having a badly defragmented drive have on audio production specifically? I seem to remember some study of some of the top defragmenting apps such as Diskeeper and that it really didn't do a whole lot but maybe for audio production, it makes a difference?

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interesting question i often defrag my hard drive with oao witch is conciderd top end. and i cant really say i've seen any difference.

that is not to say it doesn't help.but how would you go about and measure the results?
hmmmm

Thanks for reminding me. I've got a ton of drive management to be done and then I've got to defrag.


Yes - it is important. My understanding is that it helps reduce wear-and-tear on the drive by making contiguous files. I could be wrong, but I've noticed performance improvements every time I've done it on my audio drives and that's reason enough for me.

Yes, defragmentation makes a difference. Although you don't HAVE to defragment your drive, it will make a difference in performance especially if you are working with many samples.It will make less of an improvement in newer drives (due to increased disk density) and on drives with a great deal of free space (as they will not fragment as much). Also, I would not recommend defragging your drive if you are using a solid state drive, but most likely you do not have one of those.
I think the best way I can illustrate this is with a simple example. Think of a file on your computer as a stack of numbered pages in a book. If your drive is fragmented it is the equivalent to you taking that stack of pages and throwing it up in the air. Now try to go ahead read the book. It would be a mess, as you would have to look around the room for each page as you were reading it. Defragmenting the "book" would place these pages back in order. Now if you were to read it again, it would take a great deal less time as the pages would be in order again.

Also good work on your recent remix on Autumn Lights, I'm enjoying listening to it right now. Even more energy than the Alucard remix that came out a while back.

I'm on a mac and you need to defrag every....oh dang, never!

oh, how I miss all that time consuming maintenance.

Some say defragging lowers drive life. Your basically put it into over drive in order to "organize" it. That said, Ive not defragged in about 10 years.

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quote:

Originally posted by DJ RANN I'm on a mac and you need to defrag every....oh dang, never! oh, how I miss all that time consuming maintenance.

untrue, external drives must be defragged every now and then. Speedtools is very good at that

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there are 2 different issues here:

1. a NTFS file system does not read/write lineair
2. it's ofcourse always handy to have large files in ajacent clusters.

in practice: Benchmarks show no difference.......

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quote:

Originally posted by Lolo untrue, external drives must be defragged every now and then. Speedtools is very good at that

I know, you actually told me that when I first got my mac - I was just being facetious.

I dont defrag because I never noticed shit.

But what I do do is general upkeep like:

uninstalling crap programs i used like one time
deleting crap samples
deleting vsts I rarely use
deleting basically anything I don't use and making sure theres no viruses/spyware (which obviously makes the biggest difference when you do have one)

Like right now I've had a virus for a few months, its not bad where its screwing things up but it eats up a lot of cycles and nothing has gotten rid of it.
So I'll prob just reformat my entire drive.

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Here is an article talking about the improvements on system performance due to defragging.
http://windowsitpro.com/article/art...gmentation.html

Obviously, on newer systems these increases won't be as dramatic and these results are also subjective to how fragmented your drive was before running the defrag.

Also unix systems (Macs) are less susceptible due to the smaller drive partitions.