Cleaning The Disk To Maintain Write Performance - Network Instruments GigaStor User Manual

Figure 12: RAID array e-mail notification
6. Close the web browser and minimize the Areca application to the task bar.

Cleaning the disk to maintain write performance

Note:
This section applies to GigaStor version 14 and earlier. Starting with GigaStor version 15 the write process
was changed so that disk defragmentation was no longer a concern.
As the GigaStor RAID array is filled and refilled, disk fragmentation can occur over time. Rather than running a
time-consuming system-level disk fragmentation utility, you can automatically delete all of the data files that
store probe instance data. When disk writes begin again on a clean disk, the files are written contiguously until
the disk fills.
Clean the disk whenever system performance seems to be slowing down. To prevent disk write performance
from degrading, perform the cleanup on a schedule. For heavily used GigaStor probes (over 50% utilization),
perform this operation twice a month. For more lightly used GigaStor probes (5-10% utilization), cleaning every
two months is sufficient.
Before cleaning the disk, ensure you have identified and saved any data of interest or you will lose the data. See
Exporting GigaStor data for archiving (page 31).
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