I would expect all of those tools to simply make things worse, unless the system can be left alone (no new recordings or commericial skip jobs) for week or so.

It would be quicker and more effective to simply have a second set of drives, and periodically file copy everything from one set to the other, then switch them.

I doubt that these MS-DOS defrag tools are designed to handle vastly huge files like these. And "pausing in the middle" of a defrag to allow something else to run.. well that just makes the fragmentation incredibly worse than before.

And again, I seriously doubt that disk fragmention is the problem here. The access pattern simply isn't the kind that should produce enough fragmentation to matter. Not even on Windows.

Cheers