I usually don’t leave my computer on overnight, as it generates a good bit of heat and keeps my bedroom toasty, but I will be tonight.
I noticed my system had been running a bit sluggish the past few weeks so I decided to analyze my RAID array. Sure enough, the drives are severely fragmented. This is exactly what leads to poor system performance. A defrag is usually a “noob” solution to “fix everything”, but for me, it will actually do a lot of good.
This will be my first defrag since installing the new hard drives nearly a year ago. I use two 400GB Seagate hard drives in a RAID 0 stripe.
Under this configuration, the computer uses both hard drives as one, writing/reading half of the data to one drive and the remainder to the second drive. Splitting the data across two drives greatly improves disk performance. The one major problem with using RAID 0 is that, if one drives goes bad, the whole array is hosed (all of your data).
With a single hard drive system, data can often be extracted from a bad drive using hard drive recovery software. I have had to do this a few times in the past. So, if you decide to run a RAID 0 setup, be sure to back up all of your important files on a separate drive in case one of the RAID drives goes bad.
