Windows 2000 built-in Defrag

[DT Geek]

Our corporate server is Windows 2000 Small Business Server. I inherited this system, and recently discovered that nobody had been defragging the hard disks. At this point, the only utility I have available is the built-in defrag. When I run the analysis, it tells me that I need to defrag the disk (which has 29% free space). However, when I run the defrag, the process takes about an hour and the result is that the amount of defragmentation does not change at all. If I rerun the analysis, it tells me that the disk needs to be defragged. No matter how many times I run the defrag, nothing changes. Well that's not entirely true. I get about an hour older and significantly more frustrated. Just so you understand the level of my frustration, here is the results of the anlysis:

Volume Fragmentation
Total Fragmentation = 24%
File Fragmentation = 49%
Free Space Fragmentation = 0%

File Fragmentation
Total Files = 57,745
Average File Size = 342KB
Total Fragmented Files = 134
Total Excess Fragments = 6,867
Average Fragments per File = 1.11

So, is the Windows 2000 defragment utility just incredibly bad, or what? And even though I probably won't be able to get approval to purchase a defrag utility, does anyone have any opinions on which ones to consider and which ones to avoid?

[Budfred]

Last I heard, Windoze defrag was about as good as any other product out there. However, if you are not getting it to work, I am guessing that it is getting interrupted by some other program and aborting. I would try to run it in Safe Mode and make sure you turn off the screen saver.

[DT Geek]

Well, I'll give it a shot in Safe Mode, but the defrag utility hasn't reported any errors when I've run it. In fact, it says that it completed successfully. I'm starting to think that it's the Exchange Data that's causing the problem. I've noticed that some of the retail defrag utilities say that can't defrag Exchange, and some of the high-end ones either sell that ability as an expensive option or they make a big deal out of the fact that they can do it.

I really wish the folks who built this thing had put Exchange on it's own Logical Partition. It would have made my life a whole lot easier.

[Paul Komski]

If you're on NTFS then defragmentation is not such an issue as on FAT, since the MFT usually reserves space for files intelligently.

Other files, notably any page files, may not allow themselves to be defragged (or made fully contiguous), since they may be in use at the time.

Making the page files of fixed size and split onto other partitions are ways of reducing defragmentation.

Consider using a third-party defragger, if you are installed on NTFS.

[Mark Miller]

I agree with Paul and a good cheap one that I think works with exchange would be in Norton system works. By cheap I mean that for a business setting it's about 70 bucks.
Mark