Do I need to defragment or not?

[popechild]

I keep finding different answers to this. I've got 64k clusters on my record drive. I just posted in a different thread about some weird record ff/rewind problems I'm having in a large HD file. Looking at my xp defrag analysis, my drive is 48% fragmented, but I have 96% file fragmentation. Furthermore, I have over 54 fragments per file on average.

I haven't really noticed a problem until now, but this 3+ hour recording is starting to skip and stutter in addition to the ff/rw problems.

Looking around, some people say 64k cluster drives don't need to be defragged, some say it doesn't matter for sd but it does for hd, some say xp's built in defragger can't defrag 64k cluster drives anyway. What's the real story here? Am I going to screw up my current recordings if I defrag now? Does it have to be done while nothing else is recording? And if so, if I schedule it to defrag regularly (3am, etc.) will it matter that there could be a "live" recording going on throughout the night? (I don't care to make sure that there's nothing "live" recording on either tuner every night before I go to bed).

Thanks for your help!

UPDATE: I just looked specifically at the British Open recording that's currently about 4hrs into recording and it has over 14,000 fragments already! And all of my other HD recordings have 1,000-4,000 fragments each.

[jptaz]

I have gone back and forth on this one myself. I have found that with multiple tuners going to one disk drive defragging does help. This is especially true when you go beyond 75% capacity. I also found the Windows XP Defragger is useless. I Purchased PerfectDisk 7.0 from Raxco Software. This is far superior to Windows XP in so many ways. First it can defrag a drive while it is actively being used...I still schedule the defrag for the middle of the night, but if I do record something or playback something it does not kill performance. Also since I have 1.4 TB Raid I had to go with another product since the built in defragger does not support large volumes. Just my 2 cents.

John