Hard Drives....

Precisionpower said:

When do you stop filling them??

I have a couple 1TB drives with videos, And i want to add some more 80's to it. it has less than 50gb showing and it's now red.

Should i move some stuff around to make room?? or just add another 10gb's or so??

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I'd get another drive if possible other wise make room I never go beyond 80% capacity.

I don't keep duplicates and defrag often.

defrag ??

whats that I have never done it to some I have here and have outlasted the ones that have been defraged all the time

so you think your files are safe being defraged -- NOPE

pro: just buy another 1 or 1.5TB hdd

DjDennis said:

defrag ??

whats that I have never done it to some I have here and have outlasted the ones that have been defraged all the time

so you think your files are safe being defraged -- NOPE

pro: just buy another 1 or 1.5TB hdd

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:sqconfused:Who said anything about defragging making files safer "That's a stretch" ???

It's just a good idea from time to time on music files reading off a drive for retreival / speed and searching especially for large drives when one reorganizes adds and removes files constantly.

I have some drives that run faster without even a defrag
where defraging makes the drives fail faster

hey each to thier own..

Defrag DOES shorten the life span of the disks because it it a HUGE spindle and head operation. On the other hand - it does organize disks so that every day use is less stressful for the heads and motors.

Thing is, disks only get fragmented when they get full. So keep your drives to 70% or 80% full and you'll never see your music disks get fragmented. Now if you do a lot of moving, reorganizing and deleting - yeah, fragmentation will happen in no time - but for archive music - you'll be good forever without defraging!

Just promise to keep good backups! When I order new drives for music, I always order them in pairs for backup!!

If you just add files to the drive and it's a 2nd drive in the system that is only used for storage of music/video, you'll never have to defrag it. The OS drive could use it once in a while, but I wouldn't go overboard with it, it's not like your machines are being used for everyday mundane tasks, once they are setup, they pretty much stay the same except for adding music/video, right?

I use Diskeeper on my internal drives -- runs in the background, and never interferes with anything I'm doing (it knows enough to know when yer working).

Music and video drives don't get defragged -- because I never move or delete anything from them -- things are only added. Image drive are defragged, because my image editing software puts thumbnail files out there periodically.

Also note, that if you use SyncToy, it will place and update it's own files periodically in the folders being synced -- which at some point may require a defrag...

I have to disagree with Dennis' proposal. I want to see some mathematical evidence that a defrag operation shortens disk life. Sure it sounds possible, but can anyone produce produce these numbers from a scientific study or from a hardware manufacturer? I have to ask myself, self, that's what I call myself, why is a DJ focused web site the first place that I have heard of this? I have been in IT for 20+ years, never heard anything about this and I hear about it on a DJ web site? Hmm, I guess it is the internet, so it must be true...

We used to run nightly defrag operations on server hard drives back when had physical drives. Now with massive SAN & NAS systems that is basically impossible, but we still defrag local server boot drives and we highly recommend that users defragment their local system drives. Defragmenting not only speeds up access, but by keeping files in contiguous blocks on the disk it also enhance any chance of data recovery from corruption.

From what I have read, and experienced, heat is the number one killer of hard drives. Physical abuse would be a close number 2, especially with laptops. Even carefully moving a computer with the drive spinning is asking for physical contact between the heads and the platters. We tell users that they should use the suspend/resume feature when walking from their office to a conference room.

Now back to the original question - 80% is a good rule of thumb for considering a drive as being full, espcailly when you have a single drive acting as the OS, temp, swap & data device. Crossing that boundary with almost any operating system and there is usually a significant noticeable drop in performance. If it is a dedicated data drive with static data you can go all the way to full without a performance penalty.


Scott

scharris_99 said:

I have to disagree with Dennis' proposal. I want to see some mathematical evidence that a defrag operation shortens disk life.

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I agree -- no evidence points to that, that I've seen.

My drives run basically 24x7. I get 3-7 year life out of each drive (probably much longer if I wanted, but I retire them at some point).

Think of it like a muscle -- if you don't keep it exercised, it will atrophy...