We have some Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 Domino servers that honestly have NEVER had a defrag run on them. Being that these are production mail servers, management wants as little down-time as possible. We have scheduled outages every few months for updates/reboots/etc, however these are never long enough to perform a defrag. I launched the windows built-in defrag on one server and the little chart was all fragmented and it ran about 10 hours and was not even 10% completed. This is a raided server with a little over a terabyte of space, and about 900 gigs of it is in use with mail files.
We recently went through and cleaned up some old mail files, archives, replicas that were not needed and freed up about another 100 gigs of space. Obviously we also have users leaving and joining the company which means we’re creating new mailboxes, and deleting them as well, so I’m sure this makes for some fragments on the drive.
Is there a reccomended real-time disk defragmentation tool that we can use on these servers that could possibly be adjusted to have the least impact on performance during normal work hours (say 9 - 5) and on weekends maybe ramp it up a bit to maybe complete sooner?
Also we’re looking to perhaps leave it constantly defrag maybe when the drive reaches a certain percent of fragmentation?
Any ideas or reccomendations? I see some suggestions in other threads to Diskeeper and Perfectdisk, has anyone had any real-world experience with them as well as support?
Also what sort of impact would this have on a daily backup routine?
Should we not have the defrag running when a backup is going?