[Philistine]

I have an external 500GB HD with all of my CD's stored as Flac files - feeding a Bolder modded SB3.
As a matter of routine, after adding a batch of new discs (3-5), I run defrag on the assumption that it should be beneficial not to have the HD having to look for fragmented data for each music track.
It's probably good housekeeping practice for the drive anyway, but I'm curious if it helps the sonic performance anyway.
Any ideas, or other options?

[jakepunk]

It won't affect sonic performance in terms of fidelity.  It would improve latency problems (music skipping) if you are running on ancient hardware.  Defragging helps if you are adding and deleting lots of files over time, but I reckon that most people using a dedicated harddrive for music will simply add over time, so fragmentation will be minimal.  The OS will read large chunks of data from the disk during playback and cache them as it doles out the music stream over the network, so unless your music is skipping, the caching mechanism of the OS will compensate for any fragmentation you may have.  The network will be the bottleneck, not the drive.

It would be analogous to changing your car's oil every 1000 miles.  Yes, it has benefits for the engine, but it is overkill and not necessary.

[ZLS]

What defrag program are you running?

[Philistine]

I'm just running the regular Disk Defragmenter utility that comes with Windows XP.

[Val]

If you're using Windows, I recommend JkDefrag highly. Free, fast, safe, no installation needed (just unzip), easy to use even from the command line and at the same time very powerful, compatible with Vista and with a dedicated forum.

[Philistine]

f you're using Windows, I recommend JkDefrag highly. Free, fast, safe, no installation needed (just unzip), easy to use even from the command line and at the same time very powerful, compatible with Vista and with a dedicated forum.

Thanks, I'll try this out.

[JEaton]

I have an external 500GB HD with all of my CD's stored as Flac files - feeding a Bolder modded SB3.
As a matter of routine, after adding a batch of new discs (3-5), I run defrag on the assumption that it should be beneficial not to have the HD having to look for fragmented data for each music track.
It's probably good housekeeping practice for the drive anyway, but I'm curious if it helps the sonic performance anyway.
Any ideas, or other options?

It's not likely to make even a minuscule difference.  The streaming rate for audio should be a trivial task for the most insanely fragmented disk imaginable.

That said, it doesn't hurt to run a defragmenter on the disk once a week or so.  But it's certainly not worth consciously and manually running a defragmenting operation every time you put something on the disk.  If you write files to a largely unfragmented disk, then they're likely to get laid down in perfect order already.  A music library disk doesn't go through the typical write/delete/rewrite cycles that a system or data disk goes through.  In other words, it's not likely to get very fragmented in the first place.

[Imperial]

I'm using the http://www.iolo.com/ System Mechanic® 7 Professional.
The defrag unit in this suite is just superior I think..
It even beats the Raxco Perfect disc 8.

Imperial