two HDD Raid 0. Safe to defrag

0	I have to hard drives, running in Raid 0. it seem that they are running slower... is it safe to defrag them? hdd hard drives raid0 asked Jan 04 '12 at 13:24 Erick Morales 1●1●1●1

6 Answers:

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1	People say yes, but I lost an array this way. Tread lightly. answered Jan 05 '12 at 00:06 tsilb 21.0k●65●199●333 It is possible one of the disks was going bad and doing a defrag just triggered the failure. In RAID 0 if one drive fails the whole array fails (Mar 17 at 00:32) timonline

0	Hi Erick. You're Diana's dad aren't you? Should be safe to defrag any hard drive. Thanks for participating :) answered Jan 04 '12 at 15:17 TheGeekPanel 196●46●50●56

0	Yes it's perfectly safe to defrag 2 drives, even at the same time (as long as your not defraging 2 partitions on the same drive). I usually defrag all 4 of my drives at the same time with o&o defrag and never had a problem. answered Jan 04 '12 at 22:36 roguekiller23231 4.2k●72●104●142

Yes it is completely safe to defrag your RAID 0 partition (which I understand has two drives in them).

What RAID 0 does is just split your data down the middle thus putting odd blocks on one drive while putting the even ones on the other drive)

The operating system and by extension the defragmentting tool will not care or be hindered by the fact the partition is on two disks, it will just check the blocks in sequence regardless of where they physically are.

A while back I created a video tutorial on creating a striped partition and explain briefly how it works and why you would want to create such a partition. The link to the video is here

answered Mar 17 at 00:29

timonline
246●6●9●16

perhaps the fact that this question is being asked is an example to how unsafe raid 0 is... you should be fine, but raid 0 is just not safe to began with...

answered Mar 17 at 00:32

trueb
14.9k●48●99●256

That is true, RAID 0 is not the best option. If someone is looking for better performance without the risk of data loss, I recommend they use RAID 5. However for the best performance as well as redundancy, look no further than RAID 10 (even though it needs a minimum of 4 drives, it is worth it)

(Mar 17 at 00:37) timonline

Personally. I would rather defrag on raid1 personally I have a old netserver LPR running on raid 1 with two disk of the same size. if one should go down it can recover it and reimage the second disk like while using the other. It may take a little time to restore the second disk if it should fail. and depending on the size of the drives in question. At least your not going to lose and data that way.

answered Mar 17 at 12:51

Compucore
2.4k●11●19●25

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