Just to get everybody up to speed — I have a PC-based PVR in my entertainment center. It runs GB-PVR for Windows. I call it Pivo (PC Tivo). And, currently, the hard drive is fragged to hell.

As everyone reading this blog already knows, fragmentation occurs when files on a computer are deleted, and overwritten by other files which don’t fit exactly in the space left by the first file. This causes files to become split up on your hard drive, which in turn can cause longer loading times and decreased performance. It’s pretty easy to see how this can happen on the Pivo, where I record a dozen television shows a day, deleting a dozen old ones to make room for them.

To be honest I rarely think or worry about fragmentation these days — however, recordings on the Pivo have started playing “jerky,” and defrag shows that the drive is 40% fragmented. Unfortunately, the video files on the drive are so large that defrag is taking forever. I decided on plan B — moving everything off the drive, formatting it, and moving it back.

And so, that project started yesterday morning. I hooked up a 300 gig USB drive to the machine and started moving everything off. I let the copy run 8 hours, and then did the math. It’ll be done sometime in April. The machine only has USB 1.1, which means a max transfer speed of 12.5 mbit. No good. I then experimented with moving the files wirelessly to the server upstairs. Even at 54 mbit, which is faster, it was still likely to take days. The third time’s a charm. I ran a long ass network cable across the upstairs room, down the stairs, behind the entertainment center and into Pivo. The 100 mbit link light lit up, and the files began moving much more quickly. For some reason the copy aborted in the middle of the night, so I restarted it this morning. Should be done by the time I get home.

Then all I’ll have to do is move everything back …