Windows defrag best practices

The following is a listing of recommendations to help avoid these quandaries. Apply these where appropriate for your environment. If your Oracle files reside on a Windows managed drive it may become highly fragmented and thus effect performance. To keep your drives fragmentation low use the Windows defrag utility routinely. This must be run from an Administrator account and when the database is down. Change the drive letter below from C: to the desired drive.

Because of the File System Redirector calling defrag from a script is nearly impossible! You are just going to have to punt and run it from the MS Task Scheduler sorry. If you are using Disk defragmenter to defragment a volume and you run the defrag command at a command-line, the defrag command fails. Conversely, if you run the defrag command and open Disk defragmenter, the defragmentation options in Disk defragmenter are unavailable. The defragmentation process runs scheduled task as a maintenance task, which typically runs every week.

As an Administrator, you can change the how often the task runs by using the Optimize Drives app. When run from the scheduled task, defrag uses the below policy guidelines for SSDs:. Traditional optimization processes. Includes traditional defragmentation , for example moving files to make them reasonably contiguous and retrim.

This is done once per month. However, if both traditional defragmentation and retrim are skipped, then analysis isn't run. Changing the frequency of the scheduled task does not affect the once per month cadence for the SSDs. If you manually run traditional defragmentation on a SSD, between your normally scheduled runs, the next scheduled task run performs analysis and retrim , but skips traditional defragmentation on that SSD.

If you skip analysis , you won't see an updated Last run time in the Optimize Drives app. Because of that, the Last run time can be up to a month old. The computer isn't plugged in. The main reason here is that when Windows writes blocks it assumes that it's writing to a physical disk and having those blocks out of order will cause speed issues.

When Windows is writing to a NetApp, WAFL the NetApp's file system actually controls where the blocks gets written -- Windows has no idea where the blocks are on the actual physical disks inside the NetApp since the NetApp controls the physical disks and presents a virtual disk up to Windows, VMware, etc.

Is there any benefit in running a Windows-level defrag tool? Will it absolutely hurt anything?