If you are formating a hard drive you do not have to defrag because its a now clean slate as far as your partition table is conserned.All that formating does to a drive is whipe the partition menu from a drive meaning the drive " thinks " there are no files on it, when it fact all the files are still there it then allows you to simply write over top of the files as if they did not exist. Defraging orginaizes these file fragments and puts the most requested data closer to the edge of the plater so it can be got to quickly from the heads of the drive but this is a moot point if you have formated the drive. The only way to really wipe a hard drive is to do a low level format but in order to do that you need software like spinrite 5.0 that gathers the drive geometry and allows a safe low level format. You should know what the hell your doing if you do play with that stuff, this will bring your drive back to original specs. I only use that if I am dealing with a boot sector virus that fdisk / mbr does not remove. You should dfrag a hard drive when you have erased more then 10 gigs from it. I dont recomend doing it all the time because it will lower the life of your drive. The more you ask it to read and seek the more the heads move the more the heads move the less time your drive will stay in working order. I dont do it all the time but I would do it if I had been erasing alot of small files that added up to a total of 10gigs or more. I hope I did not bore you with the facts of defrag
Chris Church
I've been curious to know how important it is to defrag and/or reformat the drive on the JB3? I have been using mine for a year and have never done so. I just upload the recordings onto my computer, do all the editing and burn them on cd's. Once I feel that I have a flawless copy archived on cd, I then erase the recordings off of the JB3. Seems to be working fine....so how important is the defrag/reformat? And when you reformat it, do you have to reload the the firmware? And how do you defrag/reformat this thing anyway? Sorry if these are dumb questions, but I haven't really thought much about it and have been wondering what the significance is lately.
Thanks for your help.
- Shawn
some people format each time they remove a show from the drive - to keep the drive free from errors. it may not be necessary that often (or it may) but you should at least get into the habit of doing it every so often. i try to reformat mine every couple weeks or at the very least once a month if i've been taping a decent bit. you need to access the startup menu by holding down the stop key and inserting a paperclip or some other similar object into the reset hole in the back, when the 1st creative screen pops up release the stop key and press the play button.
Thanks for the info. When I re-format the drive, will it still keep the latest firmware on the drive? or will I have to reload it? Do you know anything about defragging the drive? Or is it better/easier to just reformat on occasion? Thanks again for the response TerrapinJ +T for your help.
- Shawn
the firmware will stay on there, but you will have to reset all your settings (backlight time, date, name etc)
the two functions you can use are format and disk cleanup - the disk cleanup is like a defrag I guess, i usually use the two at the same time, format, then do a disk cleanup. if you search around some of the older JB3 threads there should be some specifics as to what each does exactly and how frequently it should be used. i use them as preventative maintenance.
Chris - they are discussing the functions in "Rescue Mode" on the JB3 - not the same as DOS/Windows stuff...
(there is a reset button on the bottom of the machine - hold "stop" down, push the reset, and hit "play" as soon as the Creative screen shows - that will put you in rescue mode)
Clean up - looks for orphaned files and rebuilds the library/directory...if your machine ever freezes up mid show - make sure you use "Clean Up" - there is a good chance it will find the track...
Format - just "erases" and rewrites the library...I doubt it really erases as it doesnt take much time...not really the same as "Format" in DOS
I dont think there is anything that is a true "defrag" function of the JB3...
Topic: I love the JB3 damit (Read 10415 times)