I doubt fragmentation will actually cause audio files to skip. Modern hard drives, even when fragmented, are still more than quick enough to playback an audio file without too much issue.
When dealing with these technical issues, its easy to find the problem by tackling these issues methodically and isolating components:
- Does it still stutter & skip if you play your music off a portable hard disk/USB stick?
- Does the device still stutter & skip with integrated audio? If it stops stuttering, then it may be a good idea to reinstall the Modi's driver software (uninstall the Modi's drivers via Device Manager).
- If you tried the above and the problem still persists, then the problem is definitely the laptop. If you're using Foobar, I'd check the buffer size (File -> Preferences -> Playback -> Output) and increase the value.
Jeff...don't doubt
The ideas you posted are great, good debugging tools. But please don't discount fragmentation and services that I pointed out. Hard drives have NOT changed except in size and their space allocation algorithms are exactly the same. To this day, with the near exception of SSID drives, SATA and PATA hard drives are still the week link in the chain for computer speed (now you have entered my wheelhouse)
Hard Drive fragmentation
Hard drives all work the same. You store files in varying sizes and those file placements are stored in a directory. The place it stores them is called "free space" and when stored, the address of that file is stored and it is now used, no longer part of free space.
SO you happily create files of 15mb, 10mb, 300k, 200k, etc etc. and the drive starts to fill up. All of this contiguous (next to each other).The free space gets smaller and the used space allocated
Now you delete the 10mb file. Yay. I have 10mb that gets added to free space. But that space sits between the 15mb and 300k file. Now if the system just kept writing to the old free space, it would be a waste and eventually you could have files writing to all that extra free space while there was free space in the middle...and this is where fragmentation comes in
To be more space thrifty the system looks at those "in the middle" free space areas. So now you have a 12meg file that gets copied in. It sees that 10mb you freed up and stores 10mb there, then takes the other 2mb and puts it in another available spot. THAT my friends is the start of fragmentation. Multiply that hundreds, thousands of times.
A file might actually be in 5 parts. So to retrieve the file, the head on the hard drive has to move (very fast) to 5 locations instead of 1. How fast is very fast ? Fast, milliseconds which is increased by both fragmentation and rotational speed latency. But that's milliseconds you say ? Yes...but remember it does not PUSH the data at that speed. Drive I/O is measured in gigabits per second (on paper)
When you get to actual speeds it is MUCH MUCH lower ...perhaps 120mb per second in a system Lots of moving parts...
I could go on and on but this is overly long already ...Bottom line, fragmentation HURTS
Services
I'll keep this short. The more services you have running, the more resources are used, The more resources used, the slower your machine. WAY too many unnecessary services run in the background that are like taking your car and constantly adding weight. Add 4 people. Then bags of top soil. A roof rack. Luggage...it will go slower and slower.
If you think none of this helps or is true, great. Don't do it. But another benefit of defrag is you will actually reclaim space. Take a 200gb hard drive with 70gb used but heavily fragmented. You show 130gb free space but after defrag, you show 134...MAGIC ...LOL