good time to defrag ?

[DoPeFiSh]

When is it a good time to defrag? I mean, can you defrag while shows are being recorded, or should it be done when nothing is accessing the drive ready for defrag ?

Thanks

[FreshOne]

I would think most people would recommend against defragging while recording.

Personally I don't record much of anything in after midnight, so at 2AM my Sage system does the following:

• Generate list of recordings that have not been comskipped
• Loop through list from step 1
  • Single file defrag file [X]
  • Comskip file [X]

[stevech]

many/most of us do recordings to a dedicated partition formatted at 64KB clusters. Thus, defrag not beneficial/needed, and performance is much higher (fewer I/O's per second).

[MattHelm]

Is there any plugin that would allow you to defrag once a day, when there won't be a recording for like 30 minutes???

[JetreL]

In this same idea. Most defrag programs skip files larger than a certain sizes and most of my videos blow that comparison out of the water.

[blade]

As mentioned above, many if not most don't defrag their recording drives. I've defragged once in the +5 years I've been using Sage and that was due to my recordings stuttering and skipping on playback. Turned out my problem was a dying CPU. Some people swear they need to defrag or they can't get smooth playback, but I believe most if not all of them have some other oddball problem that's causing the issue.

If you defrag then you need to do it when Sage isn't recording.