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?

Comments

Wierd

[itwerx]

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...

Diskeeper

[Halvard]

Like 2 previous posters, get and use Diskeeper. I've used it going back to the 1.x releases and its done nothing but improve. MS Defrag is based on a old version of Diskeeper that is can't be scheduled. It's junk. Further, Executive Software, the publisher of Diskeeper, wrote the API for defragmentation. And it's what Norton uses for SpeedDisk in NT flavored OSes. But Diskeeper is much faster. Besides, it will defragment your directories, MFT and paging files as well.

Re:Diskeeper

[sharkey]

MS Defrag is based on a old version of Diskeeper that is can't be scheduled.

The Win2000 version was current when Win2000 was released. (I don't know about XP.) It was, from the beginning, a stripped-down version of Diskeeper. The plan was to put in a basic tool, then if people wanted more, they would buy a better one. Really, this just brought the NT code-base up to speed with the DOS/Win code-base, which has had a simple defrag for years.

Turn Off Read and Write Caching

[DorianGre]

On the Dell PERC(2) Adaptec, not the PERC(II) AMI, turn off read and write caching (can be performed through the software tool) befor defragging. The read and write cache will confuse degrag software. Not a problem with the AMI PERC (aka MegaRaid). Once done, turn back on. This cannot be scheduled, so you have to be there.

er..

[Wakko Warner]

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.

Container Scrubbing

[SpaFF]

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".