Last week I asked myself: why do I leave all my Windows 2003 servers the way they are, while I defragment my Windows XP machine every month to keep it running smoothly? Aren’t the servers far more important in a professional organization?
So I just logged in to my domain controller and checked the fragmentation… 60%! We had probably never run the Windows build-in disk defragmenter before, since our migration from NT4 to 2003.
Because we have not that many servers (20 or so), I ran the disk defragmenter on every server manually. After almost an hour, I had defragment every server. Now you probably wonder: is it useful to defragment a server? Well, I’m not sure what the increase of performance is, so maybe nobody will ever notice… On the other hand: what’s the loss? I’m sure my machines aren’t slower and I’m sure it saves 1% of disk space on every disk (woohoo! )
My advice: just defragment your servers, every 6 months or so. It has no disadvantage and it takes very little time to run. Besides, if you schedule the task, it may even take less.
