Whether or not defragging is appropriate or not has more to do with the level of fragmentation as seen by MPE rather than the state of the disc subsystem and whether or not RAID is involved.

A good rule of thumb that I recommend is that you have significant disc fragmentation if your discfree A shows total column of fragment numbers adding to greater than 3000.

I have a customer that runs a defrag job weekly - utilizing volutil - and they have a VA7110 disc array system.

Been running successfully for a number of years.

Gilles Schipper 
Sent via mobile
416-702-7900

> On Dec 12, 2014, at 3:55 PM, Chuck Trites <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Thanks Mark.  I located some more info on the CONTIGVOL in Discfree and on the use of VOLUTIL.   This use of VOLUTIL was to get enough space (if needed) on Sysdisc for an OS Update.  It isn't meant to defrag.  I agree that if defrag needs to be done, it could be done very infrequently.  
> Chuck [log in to unmask] Consulting, Inc.59 Doe Ave.Laconia, NH 03246Phone: (603) 219-1500
> 
> 
>     On Friday, December 12, 2014 3:29 PM, Mark Landin <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Unless the drives are extremely full and contiguous space is rare, I don't
> see the value in frequent defragging. Quarterly? Maybe. Daily? No.
> 
> Not sure if defragging an auto raid is useful or even recommended. May not
> be a problem to do it, but auto raid takes so much disk allocation out of
> the OS's hands it may just ignore the entire process.
> 
> On Friday, December 12, 2014, Chuck Trites <
> [log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> I have a customer with VOLUTIL built into a backup job stream to defrag
>> disks.  Disks are 2 internal drives and 4 drives on an Autoraid array.  On
>> several occasions the 3000 hangs and needs to be rebooted.  On one occasion
>> it hung while executing contigvol on Ldev 1.  On others it hangs while
>> trying to setup for Volutil using discfree A","LDEV";format="contigvol
>> "+word(R,,3).  I don't see the value in doing this procedure during backup
>> streams at all, but am looking for feedback in doing it especially on the
>> drives in the Autoraid.
>> TIA,
>> Chuck [log in to unmask] Consulting, Inc.59 Doe
>> Ave.Laconia, NH 03246Phone: (603) 219-1500
>> 
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> -- 
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> He's strong enough to win the world and weak enough to lose it." - Neal
> Peart
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