Defrag nightmare with FCPX

Hi all, just wanted to check if anyone has had similar issues..
I have frequently used Drive Genius to defrag my project drives when I used FCP7 and had no issues..
This would always help when video would get slow and things would then work a treat..
I have been working on a couple of projects each on a separate 1TB USB3 drive with FCPX.
I did a check with Drive Genius and both drives showed around 70% fragment so I thought I would do a defrag on each to tidy up.. However since this process FCPX has been sticking on the timeline constantly, audio not playing back, sometimes horrible audio noises coming in which sound like multiple audio streams playing at once..
I guess my question is this.. Is Defrag a no no for FCPX and also what suggestions does anyone have to try and get things back to normality..

Many thanks to all you FCPX gurus out there..

Hi Todd,

Ouch, that's a nasty problem you are experiencing.

Defragmentation is something you really should not do on a Mac, except when you are working with very old drives that have constantly been overwritten with vey large files. And an extra warning to anyone reading this: never, ever, ever defrag any SSD drive if you want to avoid disaster.

If you want to keep your system running smooth just make sure you always have plenty of free drive space on any of your drives, and regularly perform some basic maintenance procedures as described in this paper:

www.fcproxuniversity.com/documents/FCSystemMaintenance.pdf

But that does not solve your problem, I know. If you don't have any backups of your project drives (which you always should make before doing anything to a drive) I'm afraid it will be hard to get this working.

One thing you could try is make a copy of the files from a corrupt drive onto another one, hoping the files will be correctly written to the duplicate drive.

If that does not help you can try and find which projects are corrupted and which ones aren't. Open one project at a time and see if it works, then a second one, a.s.o. Once you have detected the corrupt ones you can look inside the Events which files play well and which ones don't. From what you describe you probably are dealing with corrupt audio files. You may have to re-import these files and re-link them to your Projects.

That's all I can think of until someone else chimes in with any better ideas.

-Ronny

Ronny wrote: Defragmentation is something you really should not do on a Mac.

And thats definitively true !!!

In these times of cheap and fast hard drives its always better to copy the content of one drive to another empty one (means just a cleaned one).
Takes a bit of time (less then defragmentation) but is a way more reliable.
Upfront you should/could use Disk Warrior.

-Andreas

Wow!, thanks so much guys, so good to have FCPX & Mac Gurus on call 24/7 to help with issues..
I have always Defragged my working drives but will leave that one alone..
On a happy note I do have backups for each drive, I use Carbon Copy Cloner so I only have a days work missing on the backup so I have been able to get back on track.

on a completely different note, I am certainly loving FCPX, after 10 years on FCP this program is a killer for Chroma work, been doing a big web project with many presenters keyed against multiple backgrounds, man this thing eats keying for breakfast, super clean keys and real time, it is like After Effects on steroids..


cheers guys..

Yep, defragging drives is an obsolete process on modern drives and OS's.