Defragmenting

[mchimes]

How often should I defragment my drives?

Should I defrag both the audio drive and the apps drive?

I currently don't have a defragmenting program. Can anyone recommend a good one?

Thanks- Mike

[TimOBrien]

I always used Norton Utilities Speed Disk on my Macs.

How often you defragment depends on how much your files change. I'm sure a busy studio would defragment nightly or even several times a day. Right now I'm defragmenting all my drives about once a week on average.

[David Klausner]

I would add that you should run Norton from the disk, and not keep it on your hard drive. It can affect your performance if you do.

[TimOBrien]

Yes, good hint Mike.

Norton allows you to make a "Speed Disk floppy" that you can boot from and run the defragger.

I used to run a catalog studio and I kept a bunch of disks around and ran them on the macs in the studio every Friday night after everyone else went home.

[studio139]

I would suggest something obvious. Before you
do anything backup your audio files, your preferences, your plug-ins and any other customized
items on the drive. Norton is a great product but
at times it can cause minor problems.
Defragment the audio drive after you finish
the project. Defragment the application drive
every three or four months.

[marcoustic]

Hi!

I also use Norton for this purpose.

Why do you want do gefrag your application drive.
This makes sense if you are overwriting/erasing stuff all the time.
But it doesn´t if you don´t record to that drive...

Markus

[studio139]

If you are like me and you add upgrades,
new plug-ins or reconfigure your system
for each new project that comes in, you do
end up writing and rewriting data to your
application drive quite often. It works
for me to keep the system stable, but you
may not need to do this if you do not
alter your applications more than once or
twice a year.