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Can I safely defrag a compressed drive on a Raid 5 system?

We have a Dell Server with Win2k and a hardware Raid. The Raid 5 partition contains a compressed folder. There is a very slow response when trying to open this file. After checking the partition, I noticed that the disk is totally fragmented. Can I defrag a compressed drive which is on a Raid 5 system without harming the data?
Yes you can. Compressed files and folders are handled by defraggers the same way as all uncompressed files. However, compressed files are always the source of performance leaks -- Windows does not use the best algorithm to compress the files and therefore causes a high level of fragmentation. This, of course, leads to loss of performance.

This was first published in August 2002

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