defragment streamed audio on clean HD?

[Guest]

If I copy or stream audio (wav) files on to a newly formatted non-system NTFS
HD, even streaming 44k1/16bit stereo in real time (which gives the drive
controller masses of time to decide how to write consecutive blocks, because
the drive is not reading or writing anything else at the time), Windows
defrag reports the entire drive contents as being fragmented and advises a
defrag.

But surely, the data has just been written to the platters in a manner which
requires the least head movement and sector jumping, so that any messing with
the sequence by defragmenting will actually make playback less efficient...??

I asked this question at Experts Exchange, but the answer given (multiple
heads writing to multiple platters) doesn't make any difference to the
principle I'm arguing. I'm sure I've got it wrong, but I'd like to
understand WHY my assumption is not correct...

 

[Guest]

Youre hd may be & may have been or is always active in the OS,xp uses
2nd & 3rd hds as a page file depending on how much ram is installed..Also,
with that in mind,youre hd may be fragmented heavily & stays that way as xp
uses it as a page file,it wont defrag because its always in use...To
eliminate
fragmentation,in system properties,set the hd to "no page file" click set
2X,restart
pc.Back in xp,open cmd,type:CLEANMGR SElect the hd,then typeefrag D: D:
being the slave,once thru,type:EXIT Reset the page file in system.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for reply Andrew, but it doesn't address my problem, because I didn't
provide enough background information.

I have 2 drives on my system. IDE drive 0 is NTFS partitioned as follows: 1)
system & program files, 2) pagefile only, 3) general day-to-day files. But
my fragmentation problem lies with IDE drive 1, a single NTFS partition
containing ONLY .wav audio files. I also get the same fragmentation problem
with audio and video files streamed or copied to a freshly formatted external
firewire drive.

 

[Gerry]

Adam

I cannot answer your question but I can make some points which should be
considered.

You second hard drive is unlikely to contain only wav audio files.
Unless you have
disabled System Restore from monitoring the drive the Volume Information
Folder
will contain restore points and even if System Restore has been turned
off there
will still be the Folder and one or two small files. Also there will
still be a Recycle
Bin and an MFT table.

Andrew E is wrong about the pagefile. However your partitioning with
regard to the
pagefile does not conform to accepted good practice. You should keep a
small
pagefile in the system partition i.e. say 50 mb -perhaps you have? The
main pagefile,
if placed in it's own partition, should be the first partition on the
second hard drive not
in the location where you have it.

When you view the Disk Defragmenter Report after Analyse but before
defragmenting
what files are listed as Most Fragmented? Note the MFT file is never
listed. Also how
many folders are listed as fragmented after running Disk Defragmenter?
It should be
none. Hoewever the MFT table will be in 2 fragments. The MFT table can
be in 3
fragments in a system partition. With a system partition you will
usually get some other
system folders which remain fragmented. Thus it is normal for the
pagefile to be in
fragmented although it is possible to get the pagefile in a system
partition to be
contiguous.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Guest]

Many thanks for those thoughts. I know the pagefile is not optimally placed,
but my disk setup is more complicated than I dared to admit in my last post;
I didn't want to take up too much message space....

There are two more hidden partitions I did not mention, each one contains an
alternatively set up Windows & Program Files set-up I can choose to boot
into, in which case the other boot partitions are hidden; so to save space on
the disk, all 3 systems dump their pagefile into the same always-visible
partition. However, I'll take your advice and put a small pagefile in each
system partition until I can install another disk for the main pagefile.

System restore ignores the audio disk, which is in a removable cage, and
since the computer can boot without it, I don't allocate it for a pagefile.
The recycle bin on all drives is empty. Don't forget that I get exactly the
same fragmentation on audio files on an external firewire or USB drive which
has just been re-formatted.

Post-anaysis report shows 10 wav files all about 600MB. 5 of them were
written at about 4x real time and are made up of about 1,800 fragments each,
and the other 5 were written at about 12x speed and are made up of about
3,600 fragments each, so the quicker they were written, the more fragmented
they were. One of the 4 folders is shown as fragmented; excess folder
fragments=1. I'd forgotten it was possible to get a report BEFORE
defragmenting, so thanks for reminding me.

I'm beginning to think I'll just defragment the damn drive and stop worrying
why this is happening.

Later on, when I've got a bit more time I'll investigate all this more
thoroughly...

 

[Gerry]

Adam

The causes of fragmentation are not always as one might expect,
especially so for the system partition. If you run Disk Defragmenter so
that there is no fragmentation and then reboot a system partition will
become partially fragmented, even by doing nothing other than restarting
the computer. This is because settings are saved on shutdown and logs
are written when you boot. The degree of fragmentation may be small but
it occurs. The situation matters little unless large files are being
written to disk and there is limited free disk space. The more files are
fragmented the more free space becomes fragmented which in turn means
that any files written will inevitably be fragmented. People say
separate system from data files. Actually it helps to separate files
always being rewritten from those changed less frequently.

I have used a shared pagefile partition and it caused no problems.

You need to keep an eye on System Restore with regard to an external
removable disk. Whilst System Restore can be set not to monitor be
careful if you remove the disk and put it back later that it does not
start monitoring the disk. You can end up with a situation that you
cannot go back to an earlier restore point when you thought you could.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[Guest]

Gerry, your attention is much appreciated. When I have a bit more time I'll
do some experiments with writing different files at different bit rates and
see if I can confirm a correlation between low fragmentation of low bit-rate
audio files streamed in real time, and high fragmentation of files written as
fast as possible.

Meanwhile I've defragged the audio drive (quicker than I thought it would
be) and assigned a token 100MB swapfile in my boot partitions. - Thanks again.