My files are large, between 900MB and 10GB for raw MPG recordings and half that for files that have been transcoded (only a tiny handful at this time on my PVR's main recording volumes).

The built-in defrag tool in Windows XP doesn't do anything for these volumes. I mean, it moves a few bytes around, but in the grand scheme of things, your disk is pretty much left exactly how it was before you started. There's no benefit I can find for using the built-in tool.

I'm currently in the process of a lengthy defrag using a free tool called MyDefrag. It's currently operating in the "consolidate free space" mode and running its third pass. I had previously run the "defrag only" mode over night which did a decent job, but didn't pool the free space (or even most of it) together.

Does anyone have any experience with any other tools that perform these types of functions in perhaps a lesser amount of time? I'm not really looking to optimize the speed of existing files, but rather to pool together the majority of free space so that newly written content doesn't need to be fragmented, possibly decreasing write latency.

When my PVR is busy, it's busy. Last night I had 5 tuners recording at once. 3x ATSC (720p and 1080i) and 2 NTSC (480i) from 9-10pm. During another hour there were 3 and at another time only 2 going at one time. Thursday is the busiest night of the week for recording, by far.

I believe I've found an issue which initially I thought might be a fluctuating ATSC signal, causing some pixelation and fraction-of-a-second audio drop out. However, I'm now fairly confident this is happening when the system is recording many streams at one time. The more complex the stream, the more likely the issue.

My evidence is anecdotal at this time, but I've started some empirical testing. First, at a specific time, I've verified that a group of channels are all producing rock-solid audio and video by observing the channels for a decent amount of time, one at a time. Then loading up the tuners each with a recording task, I've observed the issue. Not as pronounced as the worst it's ever been, but my hypothesis still stands.

Sage has a new setting which allows it to prioritize a balanced recording session, where it attempts to spread your concurrent recordings to multiple of your available hard drives. With the defrag I'm hoping to give each drive the best chance it has, essentially trying to remove it from the equation or at least normalize its impact - as if the drive were new and empty.

The system currently has three recording volumes in it. Two are single partitioned drives used for nothing else but recording. The third is actually a large partition on the same drive used for booting/Windows. Ideally I'd like to get another drive into this system, dedicated, like the first two, to nothing but recording. Perhaps most ideal would be to set up the recording to go to a striped volume and then moved (during some low-use period) to a storage volume.

I also had commercial detection active at one point which was also creating 3 tiny (under 1KB) files for each recording, but I've since disabled that feature while trying to track this issue down, along with deleting all the commercial marker files.

If the defrag testing goes well, I'll set up a defrag maintenance schedule to run every night while nothing is being recorded.