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Useful RAID Tools?
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?
Sounds like you have something else going on unrelated to RAID. Hardware RAID is completely transparent and shouldn't affect your defragging, (which, by the way, is still effective because the controller still accesses the drives in a consistent manner).
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...
If you've got a Dell with PERC controllers, they come with great PERC utilities that will do everything you need. Install them. It's a good idea to be able to monitor your RAID 5 sets.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"