Defragging software?

[mgpaulus]

What defragging software do you guys run? I have 5 drives in my system 1-2TB/ea, and some of them are really getting up there in fragmentation statistics. I'm just wondering if others have tried some different defrag programs and found one that seems less impacting on recording and playback performance? (ie, can the defrag program detect when Sage is recording or playing back and throttle back its resource consumption? Or one that doesn't seem to impact sage performance, even if it is running?)

[KeithAbbott]

Defragging an active SageTV recording or playback drive doesn't seem like a very good idea to me. I would try to find a time where no recording activity is going on (maybe overnight), stop the SageTV service and run the defrag. Once the defrag is complete, restart the SageTV service.

[nyplayer]

Originally Posted by mgpaulus

What defragging software do you guys run? I have 5 drives in my system 1-2TB/ea, and some of them are really getting up there in fragmentation statistics. I'm just wondering if others have tried some different defrag programs and found one that seems less impacting on recording and playback performance? (ie, can the defrag program detect when Sage is recording or playing back and throttle back its resource consumption? Or one that doesn't seem to impact sage performance, even if it is running?)

Playing back is ok for the most part recording not so good. What I do since I have 4 recording drives is to temporarily remove 1 from sagetv recording... You will still be able to access and play videos but nothing will record to it. Then I defrag the drive put back online do the same to the others. I Use the Windows 8 built in defrag it s quite good.

On my other machines I use Diskeeper 12 Home.

[Fuzzy]

I have had no problems whatsoever running diskeeper on my sage server for years. It doens't really add much load to the system, and it's auto-defrag mechanism seems to work really well as long as you ensure there is some working room free on the disk. I keep 30-50GB free on each of my recording drives using sage's 'Leave Free' setting. Has always worked great.

[BobPhoenix]

I don't use a defrag program. My OS drive is an SSD and I've never defraged recording drives. Never had any problems with recordings due to drive problems from a fragmented file.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

I don't use a defrag program.

Ditto. You should not need to use one at all.

[MattHelm]

I use MyDefrag, but use custom scripts on the recording drives, and only when not recording. I don't run it that much. (BTW, been doing this for 5 years on some of the drives, and no failures.)

I also use 64K blocks on ALL my recording/archive drives, FYI.

[deanm]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Ditto. You should not need to use one at all.

Being running SageTV since V2 and never defragged a drive yet. Though not the same drive I must add

[mistergq]

Before replacing my server, I was using diskeeper. I just need to get around to adding it back on. If it is needed or not, not sure.

[Fuzzy]

most likely would depend on your recording habits. Back when I had 6 tuners working on 3 drives, and before Sage had a 'bandwidth' drive allocation mode, it was a much more prevalent problem. Now, that I have more drives (5) than tuners (4), and sage is set to bandwidth, I should never have more than one recording being written to a drive and it shouldn't be a problem. Though since it's already on there, I'm not going to bother removing/disabling it.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

Ditto. You should not need to use one at all.

Agreed. I never defrag. I use whatever the largest block setting when formatting my drives and never worry about it. Writing large data sets (like television recordings) shouldn't end up with that much fragmentation. I think my current server has been going for about 3 years and my current recording drives (2 - 750GB drives) have been going on for at least 2+. I regularly have 2+ shows recording to my two recording drives with no issues (often times 4 shows). Fragmentation is really only an issue when you have lots of little writes (yes I realize that writing two shows to a drive at any given time would mean the write would mean every other block would be a different episode, but that's pretty rare).

I think a lot of times, we see things like "X% fragmented" and we freak about about things that aren't really an issue. It's why many people get oil changes at 3,000 miles, because we see that sticker and think "I've got to get an oil change" when the experts will tell you that you can easily go 5,000 miles or more with modern oil!

[will]

Originally Posted by mgpaulus

What defragging software do you guys run?

I have been using diskeeper home server version for years on all my Sage drives.

[Dargason]

This thread prompted me to open up the Disk Defragmenter program to see how bad my disks are, and I discovered that all my disks were at 0% fragmentation. Then I noticed that the program was already configured to defrag every Wednesday at 1:00am. I check my other Win7 PC and it was the same.

I think Win7 enables defrag by default.

[will]

Originally Posted by Dargason

I think Win7 enables defrag by default.

You are correct, Windows 7 will defrag non-SSD drives by default. This change by MS probably hurt the after-market defrag software companies (though they have some advanced features MS doesn't).

If you are running XP, 2003, or Home Server v1 then you might need a defrag program.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by will

... This change by MS probably hurt the after-market defrag software companies (though they have some advanced features MS doesn't). ...

Not really, the one they use is almost worthless for anything but a simple single drive setup. It truly trashes "data" drives.

The main reason I defrag, is I record a bunch of shows, and then 6 months to a year later, I watch them (still have last 2 seasons of "Chuck" to watch). Run MyDefrag (free) in Analyze only right after a SageTV recording, and you'll see why I do this. (10% of the time, at least 1 file is scattered everywhere by Windows (as in 64K blocks, no 2 in a row!!!), and the others are split up)

I create a zone for recording, and sort them by last modify, that way I only need to defrag new stuff, old stuff never moves unless I watch something old and delete it.

You can also just defrag the files, not the file system. This just fines a space big enough for the file, and puts it there, not sorting the files into an order. This works well if you watch and delete most shows after a short time.

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by MattHelm

Not really, the one they use is almost worthless for anything but a simple single drive setup. It truly trashes "data" drives.

The main reason I defrag, is I record a bunch of shows, and then 6 months to a year later, I watch them (still have last 2 seasons of "Chuck" to watch). Run MyDefrag (free) in Analyze only right after a SageTV recording, and you'll see why I do this. (10% of the time, at least 1 file is scattered everywhere by Windows (as in 64K blocks, no 2 in a row!!!), and the others are split up)

I create a zone for recording, and sort them by last modify, that way I only need to defrag new stuff, old stuff never moves unless I watch something old and delete it.

You can also just defrag the files, not the file system. This just fines a space big enough for the file, and puts it there, not sorting the files into an order. This works well if you watch and delete most shows after a short time.

That is the main reason I like diskkeeper so much. It's intelliwrite feature alters the way windows writes the packets to prevent the fragmentation in the first place.

[MattHelm]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

That is the main reason I like diskkeeper so much. It's intelliwrite feature alters the way windows writes the packets to prevent the fragmentation in the first place.

I used it a LONG time ago, and had some issues on my recorder. (low end hardware, and too much writing, I think) I used it a few more years, but didn't want to keep paying for upgrades. I'm happy with MyDefrag and zones, it's free.