Defragmented Hard Drives

Scream · 23 Oct 2006 at 17:53

This past number of weeks, I've been doing a lot of work with large video files from just under a gig to over a gig in size.

My heart is broke as the drives are always getting fragmented due to video files being saved and then removed or even edited changing the size of them.

When the drives are fragmented, explorer.exe starts to hug the CPU and its memory usage increases to over 400mb slowing the whole system down leaving its pretty much usless to work with.

The system runs fine until I start to access one of the defragmented drives.

Is there any other way to avoid this problem? Why does explorer.exe demand so much cpu+mem usuage?

I'd like to know how companies that work with video all the time get around this problem. I'm fed up having to defrag the hard disk.

Any help would be great.

rpstewart · 23 Oct 2006 at 18:07

Total guess but do you have the Indexing Service and/or System Restore turned on the drive holding the videos?

Indexing service check box can be found on the properties page for the drive (right click on the drive in my computer and pick properties). System restore is in the properties page of My Computer itself.

Scream · 23 Oct 2006 at 21:08

Indexing was turned on for the drives and system restore was also turned on for the drives.

I have them turned off now so we shall see how things go.

Cheers for that. You learn something new everyday.

james.miller · 23 Oct 2006 at 21:10

also you should try scheduling a defrag once or twice a week (when your not using the pc would be best). the more often you do it the less time it takes per session, and just think of all the time saved actually working with the files lol

Scream · 23 Oct 2006 at 21:21

The drives are completely defraged and still the same problem.

RichDuffy · 24 Oct 2006 at 11:48

Scream said:
The drives are completely defraged and still the same problem.

Are there a lot of "Files which cannot be defragmented"? That is usually mostly the virtual memory Page File. It is a good idea to move that to another drive before defragging, then when you move it back, set it to a permanent size (initial and max sizes the same value). Alternatively, keep it on a different drive indefinitely. Mine lives on D:

Also, how much physical RAM do you have? If only 512MB I'd strongly suggest upping it to at least 1GB (maybe even 2GB) if you intend to be doing lots of work with large files. If you can fit the entirety of the file you're working on into physical RAM, it reduces the load on the hard drive (and CPU) significantly.

Not quite sure why explorer.exe would take up to 400MB though...

Scream · 25 Oct 2006 at 17:54

I've got the same bloody problem.

All important files are being transfered to another Drive on the network so I can clean out the whole system.

I'll move the Page File to another drive while I am at it.

I'm still puzzled why explorer.exe demands so much cpu+mem and I wonder if the same thing occurs when the drives are all clean/empty.

I doubt its a virus as Kaspersky and NOD32 reports a clean system.

Maybe its a corrupt file on the drive(s) that is putting windows in a frenzy which was a case a while back causing windows users to right click the file before opening it.

I've a 1Gb Dual Core system and its leaves it looking like a 386.

Scream · 27 Oct 2006 at 21:49

Is there a way to identify a corrupt file on disk.

I think the problem is to do with a corrupt file so is there a way to scan the drive and pick out the damaged file using some ssort of oftware etc?