Defragmenting ReFS volumes

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timmmay

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#171208 9-Apr-2015 21:19

Do I need to defragment ReFS volumes? If so how do I do it? I have 2xReFS 4TB in a mirrored storage space.

The Windows defragment tool will let you "optimise" the volume, but it takes a very short time so I don't think it's defragmenting exactly. Defraggler claims to do it, but the analyse phase is so slow I stopped it.

engedib

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#1280040 9-Apr-2015 21:30

http://www.raxco.com/business/products/perfectdisk-server

MCSE+M/S, MCITP

JWR

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#1280101 10-Apr-2015 00:14

Unless you are having serious performance issues, I wouldn't bother with any 3rd party defragging software. To fully defrag a 4TB drive must take a very long time and cause a fair bit of wear on the drives.

I think, make sure you keep reasonable free space on your drive/array and use in-built defragger to keep drives optimized.

A mirrored drive is going to give you better read performance anyway.

richms

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#1280106 10-Apr-2015 01:18

Unless you have let it fill up or else have put loads of small files on and off it extensivly then it will probably not be fragmented.

Fragmentation happened with stupid old file systems that just looked for the first free space on the disk and then started filling from there. When files are pre-allocated, as they are typically when torrenting or copying them off another drive the space it gets will be the best for it without fragmenting it up.

Can help to defrag it before copying lots onto it, so the spaces are bigger, but no biggie if its not.

Anyway, what are you putting on it that a few seeks every now and then will matter? linear video playback should have enough buffered to not worry it.

Richard rich.ms

timmmay

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#1280118 10-Apr-2015 06:07

I've used it for disk error testing, so I've written thousands of 1GB files, but I delete them right after. The disks have about 1.5TB of information, a mix of tens of thousands of small files and some huge ones.

If it's designed to resist fragmentation then I'll just leave it. My NTFS disks can get pretty fragmented, some videos had 2000 fragments recently.

I guess it's partly about performance, partly about just keeping up general maintenance.

PerfectDisk Pro costs $40, which isn't bad but I don't want to defragment that much.

timmmay

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#1346696 18-Jul-2015 13:04

Defraggler supports ReFS now. I did the analyse cycle, 10% took a few minutes. One of my large files has 440,000 fragments, and there are plenty of files with thousands of fragments. I'm giving defragmenting with Defraggler a go, pretty slow though, averaging 40MB/s.

Perfectdisk doesn't work on W10. Their support said v15 will be released for W10 once it's available in production.

stevenz

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#1348322 21-Jul-2015 12:26

Have been using Defraggler for years, swear by it.

@KnightNZ