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Hi-MD Defragmentation?

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Berke

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It just occured to me that I can defrag my hi-md disc! It uses FAT and it shows up just like a regular hard disk drive on WinXP. I realized I can defrag when I was thinking how the MD recorded data in the first place.

When I had my first walkman MZ-r50, I got to learn how the unit recorded music on the disc, and how it retrieved data from the fragged structure of the disc. I mean as we all probably know, when you have some music, and delete some tracks in the middle, it just adds up to the remaining time automatically. I was very fond of this system as the system automatically filled the blanks. I thought about the fragmentation issue years years ago back then and I thought if defragmentation would improve the performance.

I haven't tried it actually yet, as it's very late at night, and all the himd's I have are at least %95 full (the defrag program wants at least %15 to function properly).

The thing is, while I think defragmentation would be a very good thing to do, as it'll improve performance by avoiding multiple seeking attempts of the laser head when looking for the scattered data, I also think of the rewritability of the media. Defrag means data being copied and rewritten several times (especially with FAT systems), so I'm asking myself if it would degrade media's quality, or at least shorten its life.

Any comments ideas suggestions on this? I want to try defragging when I come home from work tomorrow.

Edited by Berke
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I haven't tried it actually yet, as it's very late at night, and all the himd's I have are at least %95 full (the defrag program wants at least %15 to function properly).

If you're talking about unencrypted data content, you could move the data to a temporary drive, wipe the disc and copy back. I don't know if it would work with encrypted audio files though, if they would be still readable.

The thing is, while I think defragmentation would be a very good thing to do, as it'll improve performance by avoiding multiple seeking attempts of the laser head when looking for the scattered data, I also think of the rewritability of the media. Defrag means data being copied and rewritten several times (especially with FAT systems), so I'm asking myself if it would degrade media's quality, or at least shorten its life.

I'd rather worry about the durability of the device's mechanics. Discs can be relatively easily replaced for relatively little money, while your unit cannot. Standard MDs are rated for (theoretical) 1 million rewrite cycles iirc, i don't know about 1GB discs though.

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I don't understand why people are so fascinated in defragging MD. What's the point? You're only going to bust up your HiMD recorder's head by forcing it to read, write, and move back and forth like crazy during the process. Also, there is no "performance" issue in HiMD/MD, especially in music use. The unit has enough buffer to read ahead, preventing skipping in case the track is "fragmented." So, unless you want to shorten your recorder's life in a significant way, I don't see any point in defragging.

Even if you use HiMD solely for data, its sub USB1.1 speed is the bottleneck.

Edited by pata2001
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Actually, you'd not be able to do anything worthwhile since the audio data is presented to the OS as a single huge file. There may be some internal fragmentation, but as far as the OS know or cares, it's a single file. You could move the file here or there, but that itself does not do anything for the internal defragmentation within the file.

Finally, unless you literally pick and choose files here and there during uploads (rather than deleting or formatting yoru disc and reuploading your file) you really have no reason to worry about defragmentation.

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It is one big file so can't be defragged through the Windows defragger. If you're often editing a disc and moving data around on it then you could initialize the disc and re-transfer all the music (both usinf Sonicstage). I suppose in theory it's possible a HiMD could become so fragmented as to ake performance suffer but it would take a lot of work to do it.

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I don't understand why people are so fascinated in defragging MD. What's the point? You're only going to bust up your HiMD recorder's head by forcing it to read, write, and move back and forth like crazy during the process. Also, there is no "performance" issue in HiMD/MD, especially in music use. The unit has enough buffer to read ahead, preventing skipping in case the track is "fragmented." So, unless you want to shorten your recorder's life in a significant way, I don't see any point in defragging.

Even if you use HiMD solely for data, its sub USB1.1 speed is the bottleneck.

Well I woulden't sony have put a warning in the manual if it would damage it that much!?

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Being a single huge file that's fragmented in itself doesn't render defrag program useless. Defragmentation is already about the files that are fragmented in themselves. Moving whole files from one place to another is not dfragmentation. This was only to clear things up, otherwise I agree that MD defragmentation is not necessary.

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An interesting observation: one day I thought to try out a Shuffle play mode on a 300MB disc filled with mp3. To my surprise the unit didn't seek when changing tracks! and the songs were not very small - 8MB avg, I guess no more than 1 such song is just enough for a unit's buffer...

..I mean not only it didn't seek, it didn't spin up the disc!

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