EAST GRINSTEAD, England, July 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Diskeeper Corporation reveals that RAID devices must be kept defragmented to ensure maximum system performance and reliability.
On this matter, Microsoft stated: "Just as with a single disk, files stored on RAID arrays can become fragmented, resulting in longer seek times during I/O operations."
Although some vendors claim that RAID arrays do not get fragmented, they refer to the metadata used for file layout within the storage system, while the fragmentation at the disk file level, i.e. NTFS, is not taken into consideration.
Fragmentation affects the performance of a RAID environment because of the unnecessary generation of I/O issued by the file system. The RAID controller, unaware that the multiple I/Os all map to the same file, treats each I/O as a separate entity. A file object split into multiple I/Os is more likely to be interspersed with other disk I/O in a RAID stripe, than if the file I/O delivered to the controller was single.
Defragmenting files at the file system level and consolidating data into a single I/O can better fill the entire chunk size with that I/O; now taking full advantage of the RAID.
Diskeeper Corporation claims: "...if an application has to issue multiple "unnecessary" I/O requests, as in the case of fragmentation, not only is the processor kept busier than needed, but once the I/O request has been issued, the RAID hardware/software must process it and determine to which physical member to direct the I/O request."
Diskeeper(R) 2008 with InvisiTasking(TM) represents the perfect tool to defragment RAID arr+as it does it on the background as fragmentation occurs, thus letting them perform at their peak constantly.
To obtain an exclusive copy of the latest white papers as well as a free trial version of Diskeeper 2008, visit http://www.diskeepereurope.com.
Our latest whitepaper "Going Green with Diskeeper" can now be found at http://www.3dprofessor.org.
About Diskeeper Corporation - Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies(TM):
With over 30 million licences sold, small businesses to large enterprises rely on Diskeeper software to provide unparalleled performance and reliability to their laptops, desktops and servers. Diskeeper Corporation further provides up-to-the-minute data protection and instant file recovery with Undelete(R).
(c) 2008 Diskeeper Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Diskeeper, I-FAAST, Undelete, Terabyte Volume Engine, InvisiTasking and Innovators in Performance and Reliability Technologies are trademarks owned by Diskeeper Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Celine Bouquillon Director of Public Relations c.bouquillon@diskeeper.co.uk +44(0)-1342-327477
Celine Bouquillon, Director of Public Relations, c.bouquillon@diskeeper.co.uk, +44(0)1342-327477
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