De-Fraging Hard Drive
 

I read two different thoughts on de-fraging and optimizing Apple hard drives.
1. It really isn't necessary.
2. It helps and speeds things up.

I am using Final Cut Express 2 on my eMac G4 with 768 mg of memory.Right in the middle of a project I am having to render everything when I put it in the time line, also everything is getting very slow. Are there any good programs that work good for de-fraging and optimizing hard drives? Some have told me that it is not necessary. Would more memory solve the problem? On the internal hard drive there is 25gb of free space. I also have a 160gb LaCie external drive, it still has 90gb free space on it.

Thanks for any help
Bob Trimmer

Bob, I have to say that I am pretty ignorant on this subject, but I'll give you my experience. I tried de-fraging my hard drive on my old system about 3 years ago. This caused major problems with reading my existing video files. I was told (after the fact) to NEVER de-frag video drives. Someone else may have a better solution, but ever since then I have never clicked on that de-frag button. And I am now gun shy of even thinking about it. It was a nightmare.

Good Luck!

I wouldn't mess with defragging. DO NOT put your media files on your startup drive, use the external drive. The startup drive has thousands of little operating system files plus all your user files. It will get somewhat fragmented over time, but this is normal.

Use an external media drive, and only put your DV files there. It will have a relatively small number of files and shouldn't get fragmented. If it fills up... get another drive! When you finish a project, reformat the drive and start all over. Also, be sure that journaling is turned off on the media drive.

If you want to defrag or optimize, this is likely the best software for you: http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html. But most people never bother with defragging on Mac OS X. What I do is wipe my drives after I finish and archive a project. Occasionally I will write all zeroes to a drive (just check an option in disk utility) and that all but guarantees that any odd issues with the disk will disappear for my next project. I do the same thing to the system disk when I install an OS upgrade.

Thank You, everyone for your response.After I finished the project I was working on, And deleted it from my hard drive every thing started working fine. I must have done something in that project that required everything be rendered.

Thanks again
Bob Trimmer