Defragging a RAID5 array?

B

benutne

[H]ard|Gawd
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Apr 15, 2001
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I've got a hardware RAID 5 array that I'm willing to bet needs to be defragged pretty badly. If I take the server offline and just run Windows defrag, will that work? Or will it kill the array?
 
It shouldn't hurt it at all. For a hardware array, as far as the OS is concerned, it is just one big disk. The parity and everything is taken care of by the RAID controller. If I had a raid array, I would invest in a 3rd party disk managment program. Window's defrag utility is very half assed. It puts file fragments back together, but then it doesn't move the files after that. Basically, all of your files could be defragged, but your drive map could still look like swiss cheese.

With many small chunks of space free new files that you put onto the disk are more likely to end up fragmented.
 
Reviving this thread. Just curious if defragging a hardware RAID5 array has any benefit. The controller already scatters your blocks. Does anybody know if it really helps?

Thanks,
BoB
 
with a defragged array, the pieces of large file that are spread across the disks, should be sequential, which would reduce the need for head movement and increase performance I would think.
 
I don't think you should treat a RAID-5 volume any different in terms of defragmentation than a normal single drive. It can't hurt
 
On other machines I've used the one from:

http://www.whitneyfamily.org/Hacks/?item=Defrag

and been really happy with it. Not only does it defrag, but it packs. It uses the OS native routines to move blocks around, so it should be pretty safe. Plus, I indirectly know the guy who wrote it and hear he's a good developer.

BoB
 
Diskkeeper seems to work pretty well on our Notes servers, however they get fragmented so fast, it needs it like every week.
 
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