I have found that one of the most important things you can do when copying movies is to defragment your hard drive on a routine basis. If you rip movies to .ISO files and then burn them to disks, then go back and delete them, you are creating huge gaps in your hard drive and will cause problems down the line. I have read countless threads where people talk about failed burns and encodings. If your hard drive is fragmented YOU WILL experience lock ups during the encoding or burning processes! So take the time and defrag before you start posting threads about problems with disks,drives...etc. I'm quite sure that defragging will solve alot of them! Peace out
I have to agree with stxpsycho. I read a thread on here where Scuba-Pete and some others explained how to set you comp to Auto-Run the Defrag utility. Can't remember how I did it but I'm sure a quick search would yeild the right page. After serveral rips/burns I notice a considerable difference in speed.
Now there's always the "anomily" here and there that requires some in-depth analysis. But nonetheless it should be done regularly reguardless of problems.
If you ever check your hard drive for fragmentation right after you rip a movie or download a bittorrent, you will see nothing but red (fragmented files). If you hear your hard drive clicking, it means it's looking for files all over the place. It doesn't hurt to defrag twice a week.
Partioning your hard drive also helps a great deal and will keep your burns from slowing down.
Keep the operating system and proggy's on one partion and use the other for all your temp files when burning. This way you can defrag just the temp folder partion much quicker.
I would only defrag the drive once maybe twice a month as excessive defrags will shorten the life of your hard drive. Just like stretching old cassete tapes.
all i really use my pc for is ripping and burning, so the free space on my machine doesn't get fragmented, so defragging too regularly for me is just not worth the time.
If you are writting the files to your hard drive then your hard drive is becoming fragmented even if you are deleating them and lots of free space is still shown on the drive. Once deleted there will still remain a 4.7gb space on the hard drive for every dvd you have ripped that needs to be fragmented but that space is still calculated as free.
