Hello all, I had a store get out of control (265G w/279 users). I created another store and moved all the big mailboxes over. I would like to perform a offline defrag to reclaim space. However, I noticed that when looking at the disk managment on the server the physical drives are EXTREMELY fragmented. Is it ok to perform a defrag on an exchange server system before performing the offline defrag of the DB? any suggestions or advice would be appreciated! Thanks.

Hi, Disk defragment doesnt make any difference in your database and which is totally different, compare to offline defragmentation of Exchange database. Reference: Do we need to file-level defragment Exchange database drives? http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/25/247342.aspx Before doing offline defragmentation, check out that online maintenance is completed and 1221 event id shows enough white space for your operation. Refer below articles before going for Offline Defragmentation. Eseutil /D Defragmentation Mode http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997972.aspx Is offline defragmentation considered regular Exchange maintenance? http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/07/08/177574.aspx

Thanks for the information. However - Is it ok to go ahead and run a defrag on the disks? Will it hurt exchange in any way?

I wouldnt recommend it and it is not really required if you have just Exchange database on the drive I am just pasting below two paragraph for your reference from below article which is written by Nino Bilic... http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/10/25/247342.aspx I would never do it on running production server databases. The reason for it is simple actually - file system defrag is a very intense I/O operation. So the disc will be very busy. I have seen some cases here in Support Services, where our database engine has actually started logging warnings that the write to the disc was successful, but it took "unusually long" to complete, and it was suggesting that hardware might be at fault. Sure enough - a disk defrag kicked off just before this started happening as witnessed by the Application log. That right there is enough reason for me not to do it in real life. The bottom line really is - you do not HAVE to file-level defrag the Exchange database drives. Exchange reads and writes to it's databases in very random fashion. Large sequential reads and writes will see much more improvement from file system defrag than Exchange databases will. But if you really WANT to do it - I would do it the old-fashioned way: move the databases off to some other volume, file system defrag the drive and then move the databases back... Or at least make sure you have a good backup, dismount the databases and file-system defrag then.

Great information! Thank you very much, that is exactly what I was looking for.