RAID 5 array defrag

I've seen ariticles saying defragging a NTFS RAID 5 array is a waste of time
and others saying you should do it all the time. So what should I do ? I
have a RAID 5 array with 5 147gb drives. It takes a long time to defrag and
all that extra wear and heat on the drives makes me worry a little bit. I'm
no expert on SCSI or RAID. I'm just wondering what anyone thinks about this.

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 16:25 -0500, Todd Hayslett wrote:
> I've seen ariticles saying defragging a NTFS RAID 5 array is a waste of time
> and others saying you should do it all the time. So what should I do ? I
> have a RAID 5 array with 5 147gb drives. It takes a long time to defrag and
> all that extra wear and heat on the drives makes me worry a little bit. I'm
> no expert on SCSI or RAID. I'm just wondering what anyone thinks about this.
>
It's a drawback of using a poor filesystem.
If it takes a long time to defragment then you have a large amount of
fragmentation - ideally you would choose a filesystem that is not
sensitive to this problem.

--
Regards,
Jeremy

Jeremy <jeremyboden@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 16:25 -0500, Todd Hayslett wrote:
>> I've seen ariticles saying defragging a NTFS RAID 5 array is a waste of time
>> and others saying you should do it all the time. So what should I do ? I
>> have a RAID 5 array with 5 147gb drives. It takes a long time to defrag and
>> all that extra wear and heat on the drives makes me worry a little bit. I'm
>> no expert on SCSI or RAID. I'm just wondering what anyone thinks about this.
>>
> It's a drawback of using a poor filesystem.
> If it takes a long time to defragment then you have a large amount of
> fragmentation - ideally you would choose a filesystem that is not
> sensitive to this problem.

NTFS fragments, but is rock solid otherwise.

do the defrag at off hours if you can. And as usual, have a full backup
beforehand.