Defragmentation Options

[mssj]

Do I have to defragment my hard drive when recording and editing audio?
If so , can i do it in Panther, or do I need a softwaret?

/Stefan

[jklimeck]

Hopefully I can shed some light on this.

1) If you are doing audio / video, use 2 or more partitions, 1 for OS and Apps, the other partition to capture to, save your projects, actually you can have 3 or more partitions, 1 for OSX / Apps, 1 for scratch capture, 1 for saving your projects to.

Why do this?

1) Avoid defragmentation (your scratch drive will get fragmented, but you can erase it after a while, and then no fragmentation.

2) Your files are separate from your OS and Apps

Why? so you can quickly and easily re-image your OS X / Apps and not worry about your saved audio / video files being erased, etc.

I have a OS 10.3.5 with MOTU DP 4.12, Final Cut Pro 4.5, and have it exaclty the way I want it, then take an image snapshot of this with Super Duper.

If the OS X or any apps get funky, I dont waste time playing detective for what's wrong, (although I could, being an Apple OS X engineer),

I simply re-image with Super Duper and wa la in 2 minutes I am back to where I was a day ago, 30 minutes or 5 minutes ago.

How does this relate to defragging, well the best defraging is to Reformat. Period.

OS X Disk Utility is the answer. So you get, no more fragmentation but also no more OS X.

Solution: Re-image with Super Duper, which erases and essentially defrags and is the best way to go period.

And a few words about Norton: It sucks, dump it, Symantec is killing the product off and thank goodness, it sucks and deserves to go.

Everytime I have installed Nort Utils on an OS X machine it develops problems.

Use OS X Disk Utility, it is rock solid and you can do anything with it including making exact clones of CD ROMs / DVD ROMS, even PC CD ROMS, bit by bit copies, etc.

And Disk Utility from what I understand will get even better in 10.4 Tiger.

Hope that helps.

jk