Defragment an Exchange Volume

Posted by IceMage on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by IceMage
Published on 2010-04-26T20:02:01Z Indexed on 2010/04/26 20:03 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-server-2003

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exchange-2007

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hard-drive

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hardware-raid

The Scenario: I use a dedicated volume (RAID volume) to store all of my data for my Exchange 2007 server. Today, out of curiosity, I decided to check up on how fragmented the files on this data volume were. To my surprise, the answer is extremely. So, a three part question:

First and Foremost, SHOULD I defragment this volume (after a full backup of course)? Be specific as to why not if I should not, or reasons I absolutely should if I should.

Second, about how much time should I allow for during this maintenance period per gigabyte. The drives are all 7200 RPM SATA drives on a Hardware RAID 5 controller (Perc 5i/6i, can't remember), the files are extremely fragmented. (Over 5000 file fragments per gigabyte).

Third, is there something wrong here? It seems to me like the drive shouldn't be this fragmented. Could something be configured incorrectly that could be causing this to happen?

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