Re: Defrag issues

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Rickster wrote:

> Here is the original issue. Thanks for looking at this.


You're welcome, buit sorry, I can't help. I use a third-party defragger
(Perfect Disk), rather than the Windows one, and don't know a whole lot
about Windows defragger issues.

--
Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
Please reply to the newsgroup



> I'm looking for any/all help on this. I am running Windows XP Pro on
> two 250GB Western Digital SataII drives, set up in a Raid0.
> Everything was great until I recently tried to run defrag. I analyzed
> the volume and was told "you should defrag this volume". I did, and
> it ran fine. After doing it, I analyzed the drive once again and that
> I was once again told "you should defrag this volume". The same case
> occurred even after a complete reboot. Does anyone have any ideas
> what might be causing this? Any and all help is greatly appreciated!
>
>
> "Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:
>
>> Rickster wrote:
>>
>>> Ken-
>>>
>>> Thanks for clarifying that for us, but that does not address the
>>> original problem Do you have any insight?
>>
>>
>> Sorry, I don't remember the original question, but presumably I
>> diidn't know the answer, or I would have contributed to the thread
>> earlier.
>>
>> --
>> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
>> Please reply to the newsgroup
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> "Ken Blake, MVP" wrote:
>>>
>>>> Kyuzo wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Isn't Raid 0 striping without parity? Thats suppose to mean that
>>>>> you have two hard drives hooked up to work in conjunction with
>>>>> each other. When you save data, the data is divided to be equally
>>>>> stored on both hard drives. Defragging a hard drive means to put
>>>>> data or files that fragmented (scattered all over the place) back
>>>>> into one continuous link. Therefore, if you are defragging a hard
>>>>> drive with Raid 0 setup, wouldn't you be losing the benefit of
>>>>> the Raid setup??
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> No. See below.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> The Raid setup is used to place less overhead on a hard drive so
>>>>> they can last longer or perform better.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> No. It has nothing to do with less overhead or lasting longer.
>>>> Raid 0 (striping) is used to increase performance. It does that by
>>>> writing alternate pieces of the file to each of two (or more)
>>>> drives. That makes the writing (and subsequent reading) faster
>>>> because you can do the I/O to the second piece without having to
>>>> wait for the first piece's I/O to finish (and so on).
>>>>
>>>> Regarding defragging, you're mixing up the way data is stored
>>>> physically with the way it's stored logically. Physically, the data
>>>> is divided between the drives, with alternates pieces going to
>>>> alternate drives. But logically the drives are treated as a single
>>>> drive and defragging takes place in that logical space.
>>>>
>>>> So assume that you have two drives in a raid 0 array and there are
>>>> 10 pieces of a single file, and that the drive is unfragmented. It
>>>> will look something like this:
>>>>
>>>> Drive 1 Drive 2
>>>> 1 2
>>>> 3 4
>>>> 5 6
>>>> 7 8
>>>> 9 10
>>>>
>>>> Then assume you add more data to the file. It gets fragmented and
>>>> looks something like this:
>>>>
>>>> Drive 1 Drive 2
>>>> 1 2
>>>> 3 4
>>>> 5 6
>>>> 7 8
>>>> 9 10
>>>>
>>>> Data from another file............
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> 11 12
>>>> 13 14
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> The process of defragmenting will put this file into the following
>>>> order:
>>>>
>>>> Drive 1 Drive 2
>>>> 1 2
>>>> 3 4
>>>> 5 6
>>>> 7 8
>>>> 9 10
>>>> 11 12
>>>> 13 14
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It will *not* put all the pieces on either drive 1 or drive 2.
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Ken Blake - Microsoft MVP Windows: Shell/User
>>>> Please reply to the newsgroup


.

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