I am having a problem whereby the Information Store partition becomes heavily fragmented quickly, which results in botched backups. It took a while to figure this out, since the problem itself appeared to be one of the backup software, and not Exchange. I have to defragment the IS partition weekly. Within a few days of defragmentation, an analysis says "You should defragment this volume". The lions share of the fragmentation seems to be in the priv.stm file. Ideas? Is this normal?

The DB disk ges very fragmentet, this is normal.It seems that your DB disk is lacking IO performance that is needed. have you read this http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/library/optimizestorage.mspxand http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/2003/library/e2k3perf.mspx Lasse

Yeah, I know all that. This back-end server is fairly high performance. Although, I don;t see anything related to aligning the volumes in the diskpart help. They (H/W SATA II RAID 5 volume) were originally partitioned using LVM... Hmmm I guess I'll just have to live with regular defrags - BE seems very particular.

Are you using BackupExec and doing snapshotbackups of Exchange even though the disksubsystem is not capabale of doing this?Have seen this fail with the same symptoms as you describe.One workaround was to turn if the snapshot type backup of Exchange, the other was to separate Exchange DB backup and other filelevel backup on the same server to different jobs. Lasse