NewTek TriCaster Mini User Manual page 134

You could think of your hard drive as being like a shelf in your library. As time
goes along, the shelf fills with books. Some are quite large, others smaller –
just as TriCaster media files may be larger smaller.
As time goes along, you decide to
remove books you have finished using
from the shelf, in order to make room
for new additions. You remove a book
here, another there, opening up gaps
between the remaining books.
This makes some shelf space available
by creating gaps between the remaining
books. Sadly, another large new book
may be too big to fit in any one of the
FIGURE 100
gaps.
A foolish librarian might tear the new book into smaller sections, just big
enough to fit into the open spaces on the shelf. This would obviously be
unwise. When you wish to refer to the book later, you will waste a lot of time
locating and assembling its sections before you can access it.
How much better it would be to slide the remaining books closer together,
combining all the free space first. Unfortunately, computers are 'foolish
librarians'. They tend to want to fill in all the gaps in their storage areas, even
if this requires literally shredding your 'book' (in reality large video files from
your TriCaster sessions) into tiny fragments.
Defragmenting the storage volume has the same effect as sliding the books
together, resulting in one or more larger gaps. The end result is that TriCaster
doesn't have to frantically search in many different places to assemble the
video streams from your recorded session.
Hint: Defragmentation can sometimes take considerable time, so it's not something
you want to begin just before an important event.
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