MyDefrag + Win2008 Defrag Question

[anomaly]

Hi,

I do some consulting for a school district and am the point person on most file server/backup/etc issues.  We recently upgraded to brand new fileservers and copied all the files over from the old file servers.  While the servers are identical, I noticed that one server backs up at 2x the speed of the other one.  Obviously, there are a myriad of possible factors here, but my suspicion is that it is due to the fact that the slower one hosts dramatically more files, many of which are small.  This got me thinking about how I could possibly optimize the process, and so I decided to give MyDefrag a shot to see if it helps.  My suspicion is that the backup software simply goes through the files in alphabet order, and that therefore if the disk were sorted (as MyDefrag does), I might be able to minimize seeks during backups and yield a faster backup.  While it will be some time before this is done (MyDefrag is using 6GB of ram and is at about 6GB of ram and is at about 33% of stage 5 or 6 after a day anda half - yikes), so I can't know for sure whether or not it will help yet, I do have one concern -- will the Builtin Windows Server 2008 Defragmenter disturb the optimization process run by MyDefrag?  I'm a big MyDefrag fan, but I'm not the permanent administrator of these servers, and it would be easier on the other admins if they simply knew that the 2008 defrag was regularly scheduled, however if this process does yield substantial benefit and the 2008 Defrag process will end up pulling the files out of sorted order in some substantial way, then I'll likely have to educate them a bit on MyDefrag and set this up as an alternative (which I'm not ruling out in general, but I'd like to know the options).  Any insights here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Anom

[jeroen]

will the Builtin Windows Server 2008 Defragmenter disturb the optimization process run by MyDefrag?

The built-in Windows defragger only concerns itself with defragmenting files smaller than 64 megabytes. And it organizes the files that are used when booting. Other than that it leaves files alone (assuming that the disk was previously optimized with MyDefrag). So the answer is "yes", it will disturb the MyDefrag ordering somewhat, but not too much. It's useless activity, though, so I recommend turning off the built-in defragger.