HOWTO: Keeping Your Shows Defragmented

[wizzy]

My first contribution

As you add and delete shows the files on your drive become fragmented. Say you record five half hour long shows and delete shows #2 and #4, then record a two hour long show. Your two hour long show will span across where shows #2 and #4 were, and after show #5. As you can see over time the cumulative effect of this will be shows stored on the hard drive in various places on the drive, making things slower as time passes.

You need to occassionally "defragment" the drive, and here is a HOWTO for setting up a process to do this automatically.

1. Download Dirms
   1. Go to the Dirms homepage
   2. Choose Downloads link
   3. Choose Dirms downloads
   4. Use "Download Dirms v1.2.20 Here" link - the command line version
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
      
2. Install Dirms
   
   
   
   1. Open the zip file
   2. Copy dirms.exe to your computer
   3. I usually put it in C:\{windows install dir}\system32\ so I can run it easily from the command prompt
3. Test it
   
   
   
   1. Open a command prompt and type "dirms [show drive letter] -q"
4. Create Batch File
   
   
   
   1. Since I have multiple drives I create a batch file
   2. Open Notepad
   3. Insert lines like the following, noting not to put "1. " and "2. " on the lines:
      1. dirms c -q
      2. dirms s -q
   4. Save this file as a name such as "defrag.bat"
5. Create a Schedule task
   
   
   
   1. Control Panel -> Scheduled Tasks -> Add Scheduled Task
   2. Select the defrag.bat file you created above
   3. Click next, choose daily/weekly
   4. Pick time and days accordingly
   5. Click next, enter appropriate password for admin to run task as
   6. Click finish

You can test the defrag.bat command by double clicking it and watching output. Once you have set up the scheduled task, you should be able to look in the scheduled tasks section of control panel as time goes on to be sure it is running successfully.

You may want to observe and note periods of time (hours) where you are not recording shows, and schedule your defrag to run at times when you are not recording/watching shows!

Hope this helps someone,

W



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[gsinpei]

I'm using 64k cluster size on the partition with the shows and have never had any problems. I never defragment the drive. I'll sometimes delete or archive most of the shows which should keep the drive fairly defragmented in itself.

[wizzy]

Originally Posted by gsinpei

I'm using 64k cluster size on the partition with the shows and have never had any problems. I never defragment the drive. I'll sometimes delete or archive most of the shows which should keep the drive fairly defragmented in itself.

Yes, if you delete/archive most of the shows in a single sitting it will keep it defragmented as you are basically wiping everything off the drive.

I'm more of the type to record record record, delete a three or four shows as needed, and repeat cycle.

W

[ketchup_gsr]

has anyone tried this program. sound intriguing, but i don't know if i trust it with my files just yet. Why not just schedule Window's Disk Defrag to do it instead?

[wizzy]

I have used this program extensively for years, including running it on servers handling e-mail for 9000+ users with 2+ million files on the file system

W

[not_Shorty]

there's no need. Even a 9Mbps recording is, yup, 9Mps, heh. That's just over 1MB/s. I don't care how fragmented your drive is, it isn't going to make a lick of difference.

[RenegadeELEN]

Well I will look into this. I have a P4 3.2GHz proc with a Hauppauge PVR-500 and 512MB ram and I record a lot and watch it days later and I saw delay happening when I was watching shows. You know, as you watch the sync of audio and video progressively gets worse. Well I defraged my drive and that fixed my issues.

[not_Shorty]

defragmenting your drive or a badly fragmented state will never have anything to do with sync issues, it's absolutely impossible. Something else was occuring.

[NickHark]

One thing I have noticed about fragmented drives is that they can cause problems with a dvd burned from a highly fragmented file. So I defrag everyday with PerfectDisk.

Some files have had 10,000 fragments. Not good.

[RenegadeELEN]

Well fragmentation might not be the direct cause of my problem but defragmenting my hard drive fixes the issues on the already recorded shows.

I have reloaded the system twice, changed hard drives both times, swapped motherboards with same one, and even changed processors. I don’t easily have the ability to change motherboards to different chipsets since I am running this on an Shuttle XPC but I know I don’t have anything running on the system outside of BTV and Snapstream’s knowledgebase isn’t too much help except that that I should defrag, check for viruses and make sure no other programs are running.

I have a feeling it is a combination of my hardware but like I said before I can’t change much about that right now.

[Terminal]

Originally Posted by ketchup_gsr

has anyone tried this program. sound intriguing, but i don't know if i trust it with my files just yet. Why not just schedule Window's Disk Defrag to do it instead?

I have been using this for a over year now. I have my drive defragmented every morning at 7:00am. Don't know if it helps, but it doesn't hurt.

[Rich A]

As others have mentioned, in "some" cases defragging is a waste of time. I have now had my PVR on line 24/7 for three years. And have never defragged the storage disk. BUT .. I am using a separate disk array for all show storage. Nothing is written to that drive other than mpeg show files. They are rather large and I too have the drive set for 64K.

There no indexing, scanning, swap file space or other things going on for that drive.

Now if you are using your storage drive for other purposes and are writing many smaller files to it then you may need to occasionally defragment. Ergo it's just a good thing to have your storage drive set up as a dedicated storage only drive.

And we are talking about a physical hard drive, not one with multiple partitions.

[iceparrot]

I understand the skeptics about defragging. However, when I do a defrag check on a drive that is 99% full and it's 99% fragmented, with almost every single TV show with 2k fragments, it's hard not to believe that is part of the problem with gradual freezing/skipping.

It's not a problem with bandwidth, it's access time. When I'm recording two shows and trying to watch a 3rd, and everything is fragmented, the harddrive never gets to just stream data, instead it's accessing things all over the platforms.

[not_Shorty]

the point is, if you've got an hour show with 2000 fragments, that's an average of one head movement every 0.56 seconds. I seriously doubt your drive has trouble keeping up with that. And if it does, it's time to throw away the 1992 hardware.

[Rich A]

Originally Posted by iceparrot

I understand the skeptics about defragging. However, when I do a defrag check on a drive that is 99% full and it's 99% fragmented, with almost every single TV show with 2k fragments, it's hard not to believe that is part of the problem with gradual freezing/skipping.

It's not a problem with bandwidth, it's access time. When I'm recording two shows and trying to watch a 3rd, and everything is fragmented, the harddrive never gets to just stream data, instead it's accessing things all over the platforms.

No wonder everything is running wrong. Heck you shouldn't even be ABLE to defrag a 99 percent filled drive. Defrag will tell you that you need to delete some files and make space.

There's too much emphasis put on defrag. Look at hardware devices like TIVO and ReplayTV. How often do they defrag?

You need to defrag if you have a LOT of smaller files being written to the same drive as your show storage. And if you are using a dedicated drive where only the shows are being written to, it's not going to be fragmentted badly IF you keep at least 25 percent of the drive empty. And the smart chapter files (also stored on the show storage drive) don't make much of an impact.

Generally people see a slow down when they start using up too much of the drive. THAT is the biggest problem. I never let any of my drives become more than 75 percent full. And I don't defrag .. ever. And I often have the thing recording THREE shows at once while I'm playing back a 4th pre-recorded. That's one 1080 digital high def, and two analog .. all being written at the same time.

Now if you have drive indexing turned on for that drive, have that same drive also handling swap files, and other windows things, AND only have 10 percent of it available to write to .. well then the "defragging" issue comes into play.

Of course if a drive is badly fragmented and you only have 10 percent free space you are going to have trouble. Then defragging might free up more continuous free space. But only for a short time, thus forcing another defrag. If your 200 GB drive has over 50 GB free at all times, you shouldn't have to defrag at all.

With today's 7200 rpm drives, large buffers and very low access times, even a heavily fragmented drive shouldn't see too much of a performance hit. As long as you give that drive some empty space to work with.