Useful RAID Tools? 31
msaes asks: "I've got 4 machines now that I'm running RAID5 on. 3 are Dell's with the PERC (Adaptec) SCSI RAID controller, and one is a software (Win2k Pro) RAID. In all 4 cases, the MS defrag program, and the Norton Speedisk program said that the logical drives are horribly fragged. And from disk I/O performance, I'd tend to agree. Running the MS defrag on any of them is futile. It just cranks away for a while and then cheerfully says that it's done, with little or no improvement. I've run Speedisk on the software RAID machine and it's run for about 3 days solid now and performance on the drive is only getting worse. My question is: Does de-fragmentation software get confused by RAID volumes and actually fragment the drive worse?" Which brings yet another question. What tools are out there for the effective management of RAID volumes? Other partition types have a wide variety of maintenance tools, aside from the defrag utility, like a partition editor, an undelete tool, analyzers, and so on. What about RAID? What tools do you use to make sure your RAID volumes are happy and healthy?
Nothing much... (Score:2, Informative)
We have another one we use for a server with level 1 RAID and we have never ran any type of disk tool on it and it seems to work just fine but it is mostly used for uploading images.
In short. Alot of use Buy Disk Keeper if not dont worry about it or reformat and reinstall.
Wierd (Score:4, Insightful)
I would look at what's running on the system (virus?) or maybe the driver for the RAID card(s).
BTW DiskKeeper is pretty good...
Re:Wierd (Score:2, Informative)
/Pedro
Re:Wierd (Score:1)
Re:Wierd (Score:1)
/Pedro
Vendor support (Score:1)
My own experience of Dell shows that they may have reasonable 9x boxes, but they have no clue how to build something that will run NT.
Re:Vendor support (Score:1, Offtopic)
I'm just curious.
driver issues etc. (Score:1)
What Models? (Score:2)
Diskeeper (Score:5, Informative)
Which is worse? (Score:1, Interesting)
Buying anything from the makers of Diskeeper puts money in the hands of one of the world's most notorious cults [heise.de].
Besides, it sounds like you're facing a grown-up problem. Why not use a grown-up filesystem [veritas.com] and/or a grown-up operating system [freebsd.org]?
Re:Diskeeper (Score:3, Informative)
The Win2000 version was current when Win2000 was released. (I don't know about XP.) It was, from the beginning, a stripped-down version of Diskeeper. The plan was to put in a basic tool, then if people wanted more, they would buy a better one. Really, this just brought the NT code-base up to speed with the DOS/Win code-base, which has had a simple defrag for years.
Turn Off Read and Write Caching (Score:4, Informative)
PerfectDisk (Score:2, Interesting)
Among other things, they claim to be the only defragger that defrags all data files and all NTFS metadata files, and they list a couple of other "exclusive" features [raxco.com].
fragmentation beneficial? (Score:1)
I would guess that having files in contiguous areas of the physical disks would be disadvantagous.
Re:fragmentation beneficial? (Score:2)
er.. (Score:4, Insightful)
- A.P.
Container Scrubbing (Score:3, Interesting)
I believe this checks and fixes errors with the raid volumes themselves (not the filesystems on the volumes). Using the afacli command line utility for the Adaptec PERC controllers you would just type "open afa0" and then "container scrub".
Re:Container Scrubbing (Score:2)
Well, if scrubbing doesn't help [tide.com], maybe you should switch to Tide [tide.com]!
Questions (Score:2, Insightful)
Performance-wise, it goes into the toilet while defragging. The defrag operation moves fragmented files to free disk space, then copies them back to the "beginning" of the drive to put the file fragments into adjacent clusters, thus making them contiguous. This chews up a huge amount of disk I/O, stretches out seek times, etc. Also, how much free space do you have on these volumes? The less free space you have, the less space the defrag program has to work with. On a volume that is almost full, defragmentation can take a LONG time, and you will likely need several passes to see significant improvement. If you can, move some of the files off to another volume or tape/DVD/etc., defrag, then move them back. If you get the retail version of Diskeeper, it can consolidate directories at boottime, allowing a bit more optimization.
And remember, this is SCSI you're dealing with. Never underestimate the power of a well-sacrificed chicken.
PERC RAID speeds (Score:1)
Icewalker