Tweaks: performance tips

Do you remember the last time you defragmented your hard drives? If you're running Windows, you should... if you haven't defragged in a while, read on.

Remember when you first got your brand-new editing system? Everything ran super-fast. You double-clicked on your editing software's icon and it finished launching before you moved your hand away from your mouse. It was great, wasn't it? But of course, it seems like it just didn't last long enough.

What happened? Well, just like your car, you have to keep maintaining your system. Defragging regularly is one of the easiest ways to maintain the speed and stability of your system, but it's a lot like checking the air pressure in your car's tires. It's quite an easy thing to do, really, but it's not something a lot of us think about that often.

A Fifty-Cent Filesystem Tour

When the operating system writes a file to your computer's hard drive, it may write that file as a contiguous chunk. As files get bigger or smaller, or get deleted, the filesystem is left with gaps. If a big file (say, a video capture file) needs to be written to the hard drive, and there's not enough contiguous free space to accommodate the new large file as a single chunk, the file will end up being broken up into a number of chunks on the disk to fit. Hence, your disk is now fragmented. When a file that is fragmented is read by the operating system, your hard drive's heads now have to jump around on the disk to read the file, which causes your computer to lose performance. If taken to extremes, this could cause your computer's hard drive to wear out faster.