Defragment USB hard drive?

[ffield]

Doing anything in DVR takes forever and I can no longer see antenna channel I paused, if I am also recording from satellite at the same time. Playback of paused live has no sound and a full picture every 5 seconds or so, everything else is trashed. Fast forward to live and antenna video is OK.

One possibility is that the 2GB USB drive needs defraging. Is there a way to do that and not erase the recordings?

 

[TheKrell]

I'd say your disk is going south. By the way, what are we talking about? A 211 w/DVR conversion disk?

 

[fbara]

USB drives don't need to be defraged. They don't have any moving parts, like a regular hard drive, so there's no benefit to defrag. Plus, flash memory has a limited number of 'read' and 'write' operations. If you defrag it, you're actually decreasing the life of that drive.

I would agree that it sounds like your dvr hard drive is beginning to fail.

 

[Bobby]

USB drives don't need to be defraged. They don't have any moving parts, like a regular hard drive, so there's no benefit to defrag. Plus, flash memory has a limited number of 'read' and 'write' operations. If you defrag it, you're actually decreasing the life of that drive.

I would agree that it sounds like your dvr hard drive is beginning to fail.

Um, I have 2 WD Elements HDs that are USB, one for my Hopper EHD and one for my Time Machine Backup on my Mac. They very definitely have moving parts. Definitely not flash memory...

 

[whatchel1]

Um, I have 2 WD Elements HDs that are USB, one for my Hopper EHD and one for my Time Machine Backup on my Mac. They very definitely have moving parts. Definitely not flash memory...

I think he is confusing a thumb drive w/ a USB ext HDD. The former doesn't need defrag but also is supported. I don't know if there is a defrag for the ext HDD that is hooked up the an E* unit.

 

[KKlare]

AFAIK, the external hard drive (EHD) has a unix file system with little, if any, continuation blocks--it is mostly contiguous.
I have several nearing full with no way to write the last blocks even though it says sufficient space.
You can copy the disk to a new/initialized one and that will defragment your recordings.
That will take a lot of partial copies and even more time than you may want to spend.
The best bet is to get another drive and start archiving there. Move the other shows when there is nothing else to do.
I don't know the state of using flash drives to store programs--it used to require 40GB min and that was out of reach.
The USB ports do not provide enough current for the largest flash, I think.
There does not seem much use for flash drives or SSD as they will not noticeably improve your viewing.

(I wish you could back up from the end of file as you can on the internal drive or a button to go to the end -10sec.)
-Ken

 

[hellomann]

I think the confusion is whether its a 2GB drive or 2TB drive. It does not matter whether its a 2GB/2TB drive. Dish formats the drives in ext2/ext3 Linux based format. They do not need fragmenting.

 

[3HaloODST]

Dish receivers don't support drives smaller than 50GB. So that leaves most flash drives out (other than SSDs.)

 

[ShadowEKU]

I'm 90% sure the dish (and direct) formatted drives are journeying file system and therefore would not need any defragmentation.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[ffield]

I deleted a series of back to back recordings I had made early in the drives use and the problem went away.

From the replies, I should have mentioned this was a nearly full hard drive in a USB case connected to a 211.

And indeed a USB memory stick can become fragmented, but the speed reduction is so minor, it doesn't really matter.

And indeed ext3 Linux drives can become fragmented - but only when they are getting nearly full. The /sbin/fsck.ext3 -nfv command will list the number of non-contiguous inodes.