Originally posted by: Tom
No, just wondering. So you mean you have to move all of them, and then all the space will be contiguous ?
What he's saying is to create a separate partition (or have a dedicated separate drive for better performance) that you use to capture video to. So the partition will be empty except when you are actively capturing to it. An empty partition is, by definition, totally defragmented.
This also works well for video editing, so that you can write the output files sequentially. If you're using a non-recoding editor, using a dedicated drive can greatly improve performance while outputting big files (since the limitation is pretty much just STR).
I'm not an expert by any means, but I thought in the old days that deleting a file only reset something at the start of the file, and the operating system would use unused space on the drive before it wrote over the space where the deleted file was. So deleting files and rewriting files would leave non-contiguous free space on the drive.
Newer filesystems are a bit more sophisticated. They may try to use some of the 'deleted' space first if there is enough of it, and some filesystems/OSes essentially do on-the-fly defragmentation as files are accessed. But yes, if you create and delete many files (or expand the size of many files), you'll probably have some fragmentation.
And one thing defragging does is get all the free space back into one continuous space. Now, I don't know if that's correct, even for fat32, and I know even less about ntfs and whatever Vista does, so what I'm asking is if you know for a fact that this isn't necessary anymore ?
A defragger does what it is programmed to do. As long as none of the files are fragmented, many people would say the partition is 'defragmented' -- even if not all the empty space is in one big chunk. Sometimes it would take a lot longer to do this, since you might have to copy many gigabytes of data around to put several big chunks of free space together. Doing this is optional with some defragmenting programs.
Unless you plan on actually writing one giant file into all the free space (and you can't deal with slight, occasional performance hiccups), having one 100GB chunk of free space isn't much better than having, say, four 25GB chunks. Slight free space fragmentation isn't going to cause problems with video capture -- it's mostly an issue when the OS has to seek hundreds of times per second, since then your transfer rate temporarily gets very low. Normally your capture program will buffer to RAM -- but if you run out of RAM, it might not be able to keep up.
