how does defragging a raid0 array work?

[shiek]

Hey there,

1) how does defragmenting a raid0 array in windows work?
2) is it a good idea to defragment a raid0 array?

 

[Vertigo Acid]

1) The same as any other volume
2) Do you defragment your other volumes? If so, why wouldn't you defrag your RAID-0?

 

[shiek]

well i dont know how the defragmentation works. since you have 2 volumes working in parallel how does windows defrag move the files and where does it place them? Does it place them on only 1 drive or is it up to the controller to split the files evenly?

 

[Vertigo Acid]

Windows has no knowledge of the workings of the RAID controller. It could be 1 drive, it could be 10,000 drives.... windows doesn't know. All it sees is a logical volume of storage. So when it defragments, all it basically says is "move all these files to be contiguous, and move all the free space to the end of the volume". It has no idea how that physically corrisponds to the drives themselves. I think you might also be confused a bit as to how striping works. You can never have a file on "just one drive". Say you have a 32k file, and the stripe size is 4k. That means you'll have 4 stripes of the file on one drive, and 4 on the other. You can't move all 8 of the stripes to one drive. RAID-0 by deffinition means you are spliting the files evenly