Defrag or scandisk

[techyphil]

Anyone defrag or use often check e.g scandisk or other tools on the server drives at all?

Just wondering if its a good idea or not, I cant see it doing any harm and surely seek times would be faster.

I should imagine a defrag would take hrs n hrs initially as its never been done in atleast 2years.

Cheers

[Geoff]

yes, you should do this regularly.

[Dos_Box]

I do it every half term on a thorough check overnight on all my servers.

[_Bat_]

We defrag our servers as often as holidays permit, however I've never seen scandisk in action on the servers before.

[richard]

The only time I have seen scandisk in action on a server is when some prat of an electrician decided to trip the circuit breaker to my old server room and took out the servers. Didn't have a UPS at the time as the school said they didn't need one. Got one a week later though

[techyphil]

Ok, thanks I shall book that into my things to do this halfterm

[DMcCoy]

chkdsk. I'd be horrified to see scandisk again!

[titanium]

Install Diskeeper Server edition, its really easy on the resources and is one of the best automatic defraggers available. You will not have to check on when to defrag as it will do it when needed. We have it at work and there are no hitches whatsoever. I have the home edition installed on my system and it works great.

[Geoff]

O&O Defrag is another option. I use it at home.

http://www.oo-software.com

There's a server edition that has network management capabilities too.

[Skoggmeiger]

Why not simply schedule Defrag to run every saturday afternoon?

Free and simple.

I shut all my (personal) computers down with a batch file each night that runs defrag first. Takes a while the first time it is run, but because it is run so frequently, it doesn't take long and my computers run a lot faster and more reliably. Granted, you can;t do this with a server as it;s rarely switched off, but you could certainly do it at least once a week.

[bishopsgarthstockton]

defrag was set off before i left work on friday night, unfortunatley i have not this or a month "ducks and hides"

[DMcCoy]

Defrag is only so effective as it only works on a file system level, so you can reduce the number of calls to retrieve a file, but the os has no idea of the physical location of the data

[R.M.B]

Nearly all my workstations use WOL to start in the morning. As part of the startup process they all run a batch file that runs DEFRAG. Since it is done so often, even the oldest machines (purchased in the year 2000) complete this in under 10 minutes.

All my servers run a similar process over the weekend. This does not have any visible effect on the 7x24 web service we provide.

I have downloaded the free tool from Diskeeper which is supposed to show that I need to purchase their product - and have runn it several times on several systems (both 'random' workstations and servers). In all cases it has shows that my systems would not benefit from defragmentation.

[Geoff]

Also be aware, if you're using a SAN, NAS or even just a SCSI raid card. The underlying filesystem does not relate to what the OS sees. So even if Windows thinks the filesystem is fragmented, it probably isn't. And trying to defrag it will probably lead to problems and/or worse performance.