Defragmentation

[Ayman Altounji]

Can anyone refer me to documentation, Compaq or otherwise, that addresses the pros/cons of installing defragmentation software on Proliant servers with Smart-2 series controllers running NT and 2000?

My company uses a variety of Proliant servers with a variety of Smart-2 cards, and has commisioned me to research whether or not to invest in Diskeeper or some other defrag product. All of our servers are configured Raid 5.

Any information would be highly appreciated!

[Ayman Altounji]

Although this isnt documentation Ill tell you the results of some of my research. First I will talk about everything BUT file and print servers. Nightly defrags on these machines gain no benefits. If a machine has never been defragmented before you may notice increased boot times, application load times etc. I would say that every machine should be defragged once after complete install. For file servers the entire server doesnt change all the time, your usually better off running a defrag once on the weekend or even less frequant depending on use. Since your network and the pc at the other end itself will be bottlenecks only the worst fragmentation will cause an issue. You should check out www.oo-software.com . OO defrag is way better than diskeeper in my opinion. The freeware version doesnt do any of the cool features but its nice for dekstops. Its a MMC based application and it runs great on win2k and win nt. For a print server I would HIGHLY recomend a date based defrag. Since all the install files and os files will have old dates that will be placed first. This will give the spooler all the free space it wants at the end of the disk. Oh yeah, I only defragged these once as well. For database servers and such you will have to figure it out, i have no solid evidence in either direction