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[modelmaker]

I have about 6gigs left of an available 186gigs on my 200gig HD. Is it OK to use up the186 gigs (within a couple hundred megabytes) ? Or should I only fill it to within a few gigs?

[Robert Taylor]

Experience and general consensus indicates that filling hard drives fuller than 80% is not a good thing.

This may have changed over time, though, as drives have got bigger and bigger.

In "Ye Olde Daze", keeping your drive from getting too full helped performance significantly, and prevented fragmentation to a degree.

I still hold to this belief, and try NOT to have any of my drives fuller than 80-85%...

I'm a system administrator, and also try to prevent drives getting too full in the business environments I work in. This is more difficult, however, as you have management trying to wring every last cent out of their investment...

[JimH]

Lunch,
I agree with you if the drives are small, but keeping 36GB open on a 200GB drive seems too conservative.

The important things are that fragmentation of files is minimized, and that there is room to work on files, so I'd say you need space available that is significantly (1.5X ?) larger than the largest file you plan to work on.

modelmaker,
I also will readily bow to Lunch's superior knowledge in this area.  Mine is just an opinion.

[edbro]

You might want to set your Pagefile to a set size instead of letting Windows do it dynamically. That way you know you will have enough hd space reserved. The usual figures are 1.5 times your available RAM.

[KingSparta]

If you Do Use More, And you Use Norton Protected Recycle Bin you must turn that off.

MS Defrag And Notron Speed Disk Will Also Refuse To Defragment

[Robert Taylor]

Jim, you're probably pretty right about the wastage of large chunks of space with modern bigger drives.

I have had some rather nasty experiences with trying to defrag very full hard drives (yes even big ones). I would be interested to see how a defrag went on a 200Gb drive with only 100Mb free on it. I'll bet it would run like a dog with no legs.

I agree with 'edbro' as well, I always hard set my pagefile to a fixed size (which I set to anywhere from 1.5 - 3 X RAM size).

I use Executive Software's Diskeeper Pro defgragger in place of the dread MS WinXP one.

[KingSparta]

on a 300 gig drive usable space 279 gigs with NT format, 16.66 Gigs free

MS disk defragmentor complains, you have 5% aval, the fregmentor needs at least 15% free.

you can continue but they say that it will not complete the operation.

[JimH]

So why would you need 15% (40GB) free just to defrag?  That doesn't make sense.  It sounds like a leftover from the days of 80MB drives.

[KingSparta]

No Clue

I Thought It Was A Bit Much Also

Norton Speed Disk Does Not Complain But It Does Recomend The I Have More Free Space.

One Of The Files Is Frgmented 1112 times t is a old Dick Tracy mpg movie called G-Men It Is 169 Megs, 16 mins plus

i guess i need to defrag

[hit_ny]

on a 300 gig drive usable space 279 gigs with NT format, 16.66 Gigs free

MS disk defragmentor complains, you have 5% aval, the fregmentor needs at least 15% free.

thats the point, MS disk defragmentor cant handle it.

I use O&O defrag 6.5, it can defrag with only 5% of space aval. Earlier versions could not. I also use FAT32, instead of NTFS.

In any case i run defrag on my media drives on an almost daily basis so frag levels are as close to zero as they can be. Makes for a faster defrag too.

[zagor]

Last night I succesfully defragmented my 99% full second HD. It's a 200 GB drive and I always defragment the drive once in a month. There are 5000 ape files in the drive. So number of fragmented files are limited.
Indeed the windows defragmenter said that it needs at least %5 free space but I didn't listen.
Now there are no fragmented files in the drive.

[Mastiff]

I have one of my 200 gig disks full within around 150 megs, and I have had no problems with that. Of course defragging is not really an option there, since that's a music disk, and when it was full, I have stopped adding files to that disk.

[modelmaker]

Thanks for all the replies!

I just defragged this drive a few days ago with about 7 gigs left on it with out any problems or warnings (there was very little  fragmentation - it only took about 20 minutes). I have defragged fairly regularly.

I run Win2K and the files are NTFS. Only mp3s and cover art are on this drive (my ape and wav files are on a different drive).

I have seen no degradation in performance. The only operation that is slow: "Edit/move to folder" - when I select this drive it takes a while for windows to open the directory, but it 's been that way since I had about 70 or 80 gigs on it. There are currently 3215 folders & 31 595 files on this drive.

I guess I'll quit this drive at 5 gigs avail and move on to a new drive until I can get a bigger one or go serial raid.

It sure didn't take long to fill that 200 gigger!

[Mastiff]

Harddisks are just like desks: When you get a new, bigger one, the stuff will quickly expand to fill it all.

Oh, and for mp3s and cover art I would have to say that there's no chance in hell that the disk will be holding you back during playback or other normal activity, no matter the amount of fragmentation! I just don't believe that.

[modelmaker]

I just checked one of the backup 200giggers the I use in the car (it's a duplicate of the  previously mentioned HD) and it's never been defragged and performs flawlessly with the laptop in the car. Actually, as far as playback goes, all 3  200giggers have performed perfectly.

[Mastiff]

Dang, here I thought I was the only one keeping a full backup and using that as a car system! 

[modelmaker]

Actually, I keep 2 full backups and they are rotated between the desktop and the car every few days. So, one is always completely up to date and the other only a few files behind.

[Mastiff]

You mean I have finally found somebody who's more paranoid then me? My wife won't belive this until I show her your posting! 

[modelmaker]

As I mentioned in another post, I lost about 30gigs of mp3s a while back which cost me a lot of money and time and some irreplacable music, I was bound and determined to do what I could to prevent that from happening again.

So I chose 3 200g drives, 1 fixed and two removable, this way I could also have the same library in the car and the chances of all 3 drives failing at once are pretty slim.

But, of course now they're full, so I've had to rethink my situation. I believe I'm going to use 2 of the old drives and do a serial raid config and purchase 2 very large external drives as the 2 new backups.

But I think the 3-way backup is the way to go. Burning disks is a pain and they just sit and gather dust, at least with the drives they're usable and not just dead storage.

[hit_ny]

Woo... lots of $$$$ for your 3-way backup.

How bout this ?

...rate your music...only keep albums that score above a certain level. Backup the rest to DVD.

200GB online ought to be enough right.

You can keep your existing setup, maybe need to get a dvd burner. It could  come in handy when you want to make DVDs of family movies.

[Mastiff]

Modelmaker, I agree. Hard disks are the way to go. I simply add a  hard disk every time something is full. I'm about to take out an old 75 gig from the media server and put in a 120. Heavy metal is exploding in my collection these days...

hit_ny, we're not speaking the same languague, I'm afraid (and no, I'm not refering to my norwegian...). You really think a 200 gig hard disk is expensive these days? Man, I almost bought a 20 meg hard disk around 15 years ago for 1200 dollars! I will gladly pay a few dollars extra so I won't have to mess around with burning that many DVDs. Besides DVDs are not very sturdy. And why on earth do you want to have a media server if you're not able to find that album you haven't listenend to for 10 years in 15 seconds? At least that's why I'm doing this.

[GHammer]

Woo... lots of $$$$ for your 3-way backup.

How bout this ?

...rate your music...only keep albums that score above a certain level. Backup the rest to DVD.

If I am not going to have them available, why keep them at all? I have the CD presumably.

Even here in China on VERY little pay, I have upgraded to 160 Gb SATA drives and have some 40 & 80 Gb drives in the cabinet.

[hit_ny]

You really think a 200 gig hard disk is expensive these days?

No...3x 200Gb might be. once u cross that 200Gb, get ready for another 3x200Gb.

when i had a 120Gb...i forced myself to clean up...then i got another 120Gb...same thing. I only have double redundancy with spare hardrives.

One third of my albums still don't make it to my desired score of 3 avg. So i cull the 2 star tracks of them. I'm never going to recommend a lower than 3 star album to friends anyway.

This is one of the things i like about MC...it allows me to increase the value of my collection.

[Mastiff]

I still disagree. Three 200 gig drives on a norwegian Net shop will only cost me around 400 dollars. That's really cheap, in my opinion. That's less than the cost of 20 CDs.

[GHammer]

One third of my albums still don't make it to my desired score of 3 avg. So i cull the 2 star tracks of them. I'm never going to recommend a lower than 3 star album to friends anyway.

Then why would you want to rip them and keep them on a DVD? You have the source after all.

[hit_ny]

Let's say they aged faster than the rest. I did like them at one point in time, but they sound tired now. But there are a few tracks that i like on them still.

Once an album slips below 3, its run out of steam and gets phased out eventually.

i guess backing up to DVD is for those, "im not sure if i want to get rid of yet" albums. These ones get a relisten every few months.

[KingSparta]

I think some car players now read DVD data disks (mp3 disks)

[LonWar]

I think some car players now read DVD data disks (mp3 disks)

yes, You can also get a Car DVD changer.... Get a burner that will do dual layer and you have 8 gig * 10 disks.....


I'm just waiting for JVC to bring one out.....

[Jaguu]

Defrag? Is it real?

Back in the old Unix and VMS (the Vax Operating system) we were always wondering about this funny defrag tools that DOS/Windows users used to use. On Unix and VMS systems you never had to do any defrag as a file system basically was a list of pointers and for that reason the actual location of the data on disk was fairly irrelevant.

Then we learned how FAT was built and realized the reasons and need to defrag the file system. Then came NT and NTFS and as you might remember the chief architect of NT was Dave Cutler, who was personally hired by Bill Gates to write a new operating systems. Now, this guy Dave Cutler is probably the only person on this planet that has written something like 6 to 7 different operating system, one of them the famous Vax-VMS. He certainly designed NT on the basis of his previous experience and make it better. As far as I remember people used to say that NTFS was basically a newer or a simplified version of the Vax-VMS file system.

So, theoretically defrag does not make much sense on a list of pointers. But as DOS/Windows users were used to defrag, some clever companies thought they could really make good business to continue with defrag. To our eyes and to our  conscience it is certainly pleasing to see on screen how our files are properly ordered and structured, but I think  the operating system does not really care about...

At least I have never noticed any significant degradation of the NTFS file system on a highly fragmented disk.  So I would say defrag is a total waste of time!

Of course, I run defrag too on a regular basis, it is nice to know that your disks looks pretty cleaned up 

[KingSparta]

that reminds me of a song

Listening to: 'Gimme Your Money Please' from 'The Anthology (Disk 1)' by 'Bachman Turner Overdrive'

[modelmaker]

I guess I'm old school; I never threw out an album I didn't like!

I have 12 000 LPs and about 300 reel to reel tapes (DBX NR) that I am digitizing or replacing (on the computer) with high quality mp3s so I can have instant access to the music. The MC Jukebox. No, I won't be getting rid of the LPs, they still sound the best when listening critically and it's also nice to hold a real album cover in your hands.

I don't want to replace one disc type media(LPs) for another(CDs or DVDs). I only have about 350 CDs and I haven't touched them since I ripped them.

So I'm in total agreement with Mastiff. And the drives only cost me 135$US each. Even if the next round costs me twice as much, I still think it's a very worthwhile investment for instant access and not have to look for disks of any kind.

[IanG]

On Unix and VMS systems you never had to do any defrag as a file system basically was a list of pointers and for that reason the actual location of the data on disk was fairly irrelevant.

Please don't tell me you've forgotten Raxco's Rabbit s/w  .  And didn't you spend many a happy afternoon dumping file header blocks, making sure those pointers hadn't got out of hand?  How quickly they forget 

Ian G.

[risingdamp]

This topic prompted me to defrag my music drive (I only previously did my C drive) but I can't do it with windows tool as there is only 12% left.  Does anyone know of a good freeware (or reasonably cheap) program?  I searched but came up blank.

[KingSparta]

PerfictDisk 7.0 gives you a 30 day trial

[risingdamp]

PerfictDisk 7.0 gives you a 30 day trial

Thanks but it's $40, which is a lot more than I wanted to pay.  I was thinking of something around $15 or less.

[Ce.D]

Fragmentation/capacity issues can also be advantageously addressed through partitioning.

My policy is:
- one partition for temp/page files (that is automatically cleaned up when the system shuts down); an old habit from the /tmp directory in the UNIX world
- one "small" partition for office-type documents, the ones that typically don't take that much space but are updated quite often (thus quickly leading to fragmentation)
- one "large" partition for multimedia-type documents, the ones that needs lot of space but are usually created once-for-good (thus keeping fragmentation to a low status)
- one partition for the system; who hasn't been playing with system images in the Windows world ?

And when you have more than one drive available, try to put the "temp/swap" partition on a different drive than your system/documents partition.

This approach improves performance but also allows to fill the "low fragmenting" partitions to nearly 100% without major issues.

My 1-penny advice

[Mastiff]

Ce.D, said with my best David Letterman voice: "It's like I have a twin!"  I do it exactly the same way, with a small addition: I have an extra 4 gig partition on all disks that have a Windows installation on it. It's formatted in FAT32X and has the minimum needed files for startup of Win98 (like a bootable floppy disk) and PowerQUest Drive Image. Then I can always keep my most recent image there, and it will take me around 5-10 minutes to be back up if something (like new drivers or a new alpha, which I always create an image before I innstall) messes up the system.

[IanG]

Does anyone know of a good freeware (or reasonably cheap) program?  I searched but came up blank.

Have a look at DIRMS and Ripsaw.  DIRMS is the main defragging app and has to be run from a command line. Ripsaw defrags on the fly, but should have a defragged drive to start with.

Ian G.