Can Defragmenting Cause an Increase in Initial Load Times?

[Meyo]

I've seen posts on other forums where someone will make the claim that sample drives should not be defragmented.  I always assumed this to be wrong, but I recently defagmented one of my VSL sample drives for the first time and found that my load times have significantly increased.  Since I wasn't expecting this I have no hard data, but I'm definitely drinking more coffee while waiting for my project to come up.

Is this possible or should I be looking for another cause?

My system:

64 bit Vista

64 bit Cubase 5.0.1

This particular project is using multiple VIs and not VE.  All Vienna and Syncrosoft software is patched to the latest revision.

Thanks,

John

[cm]

 basically there is no need to defragment a drive holding samples because after installing the content the volume is only read - what you should do is defragment before installation if the drive has been heavily used before for writing to create a large unfragmented area on your volume.

 

what defragmenting does:

under the assumption a file is a related heap of data defragmentation tries to sort all data blocks (usually 4 KB each) of a file in an ascending order on the disk to reduce seek time during reading.

now Vienna Instruments data consist of up to 40 or so of such 512 MB dat-files and the inherited content is *ordered* from dat01 to say dat36 - if the defragmentation application now re-orders the dat files (say to 10, 04, 23, 15, ect) every dat-file in itself is correctly sorted, but the higher order level is distorted ...

 

that's what i could think has happened ... christian

[Meyo]

Thanks Christian,

John