Defragment RAID 0 Array?

[linkinpark342]

So I was bored today and was randomly looking through my start menu (i'm on winter vacation and slowly running out of people to kill in CS) and saw the disk defragmenter. I thought to myself "why not" selected it and analysed my main C: partition which consists of two 80GB Seagate SATA Barracuda's in RAID 0 and came up with a graph that was divided into two parts basically, data from the beginning and data starting half way through and Windows told me that i should defragment. Should i listen to it? Should i EVER deframent a RAID 0 array? this i the first computer i've ever built that had the RAID option availble at time of building . Thanks.

 

[RiDE]

Why not?

 

[linkinpark342]

well, would it currupt the data or make it cancel out the whole point of the RAID 0 by moving all the data to one drive rather than split between the two?

 

[Quasmo]

lol, the raid controller makes windows see the two disks as one, it wont put all the information on one drive, it will take files that are split (seperate split from the array) and put them back together. Like if you had space on your drive and it filled it up and then there was no more room to write, it would put a redirect tag at the end of that write pointing to the next open space, where it would continue to write the rest of that file. Defragging removes those tags by putting those peices back together in one string.

 

[wkinney]

disk defrag sees your raid volume as a single disk, not as a two disk array. It will simply send the move commands to the raid controller...

 

[ub3rnewb]

It's a RAID stripe, not a mirror.

 

[CraKaJaX]

Originally posted by: RiDE
Why not?

 

[linkinpark342]

very well. i'm holding all of you responsible for anything that goes wrong. last time i defragmented (though i'm not sure if it was the defragmentation process or one of the random programs i installed) my windows developed a MASSIVE startup time (going from somethin glike 30 seconds to 8-10 minutes).

 

[imported_goku]

Originally posted by: linkinpark342
very well. i'm holding all of you responsible for anything that goes wrong. last time i defragmented (though i'm not sure if it was the defragmentation process or one of the random programs i installed) my windows developed a MASSIVE startup time (going from somethin glike 30 seconds to 8-10 minutes).

Drive failing? It's possible that after defragging, that was all that was left between having a fulling functioning drive to one that is about to die. Defragging can stress a drive but leaving a drive fragmented can cause more stress to the drive in the long term and save you time so it's obviously best to defrag. Keep your files contiguous and you'll be good and won't have to defrag as much.