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Useful RAID Tools?

Posted by Cliff on from the defrag-undelete-checkers-and-so-forth dept.

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?

3 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Which is worse? by Pauly · · Score: 1, Interesting
    Which is worse? Microsoft or Scientology?
    Buying anything from the makers of Diskeeper puts money in the hands of one of the world's most notorious cults.

    Besides, it sounds like you're facing a grown-up problem. Why not use a grown-up filesystem and/or a grown-up operating system?

  2. PerfectDisk by mweber · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As far as defrag tools go, I can't comment on Disk Keeper, but I've had pretty good experience with PerfectDisk from Raxco Software.

    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.

  3. Container Scrubbing by SpaFF · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Have you tried scrubbing the container?
    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".

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