Is it safe to defragment hard drives containing audio?
What is the situation with defragmenting audio drives? I don’t generally use long streams of audio for multitrack recording, preferring to drop samples into my sequencer (if you see what I mean). I’m sure that defragging would speed up audio access, but I want to make sure before I attempt anything. Paul Damian via email Martin Walker replies: All hard drives get fragmented, simply because we all have occasion to delete files. Once there is a gap in the drive where a file used to be stored, the next time you save any file it may use this gap to store part of its data, and then store the remainder in another empty part of the drive. In time, the contents of the drive can therefore become extremely ‘fragmented’, and individual files may end up split into small chunks scattered about on the disk. It can take noticeably longer to read and write files on a badly fragmented drive, simply because the read/write heads have to jump about between the individual fragments, rather than smoothly mo
