Defraging in Cruise Control

[rxp]

Hi,

Just purchased FlexRaid and used Cruise Control from the wiki to set it up. Just wondering how I do defrag's as it's taken the local drive letters away.

Thanks

[DrBlaze]

I use O&O Defrag, it can access the drives whether they're mounted or not.  I can also defrag all 10 of my DRU at once which is a bonus.

If you just want to use windows you would have to goto disk management and assign a drive letter, defrag, then remove the drive letter.  This can be dangerous though.  Try not to even open the drives in winows explorer, depending on how you have explorer configured it can make small changes to the drives just by exploring them, which would mess up your parity.

[rxp]

Thanks for the O&O tip, using that now and working perfectly.

[adoucette]

Question - does windows defrag handle this with the pooled drives satisfactorily?
If I look at my defrag options, the windows degrafmenter sees all of my drives and reports that it has been successfully defragging each them on a schedule.
You can see the drives in the FlexRaid pool listed below:

[liq456]

I use O&O Defrag, it can access the drives whether they're mounted or not.  I can also defrag all 10 of my DRU at once which is a bonus.

If you just want to use windows you would have to goto disk management and assign a drive letter, defrag, then remove the drive letter.  This can be dangerous though.  Try not to even open the drives in winows explorer, depending on how you have explorer configured it can make small changes to the drives just by exploring them, which would mess up your parity.

Do you use the zone filling feature? Is it safe or necessary to defrag the PPU drive?

[DrBlaze]

I wouldn't defrag the ppu, there's really no reason to.

As far as Zone Filling, I've only ever used it on my system drive.  I suppose you could use it but it would really slow the defragmentation down, and is mainly for grouping your system files on the fastest part of the drive, followed by program files, followed by data you don't access much.  I've got 20TB of media files in my array, so grouping would be pointless.

[rxp]

How do you guys handle it when one of your DRU's hardly has any free space? Defrag obviously doesn't work too well in this situation. Is there a way to handle this with Flexraid where it can perhaps move data to a freer area?

[bnwbass]

Which version of O&O is needed to defrag drives in flexraid array/
thx
bw

[DrBlaze]

How do you guys handle it when one of your DRU's hardly has any free space? Defrag obviously doesn't work too well in this situation. Is there a way to handle this with Flexraid where it can perhaps move data to a freer area?

What I've done in the past is chose a few dozen gigs of the most fragmented files (on that disk) and move them out of the array.  Then once defrag is done move them back  (O&O will list files according to fragments)

Which version of O&O is needed to defrag drives in flexraid array/
thx
bw

The free or the pro will work, but with the pro version you can do all your drives at once (you can test it for 30 days)


I also forgot to mention before but one really nice bonus is that you can run chkdsk on your drives without mounting them first.  So I can check all 12 drives in my array in about a minute or so