When it has completed the analysis, you can click on the Job Report tab to see a much more detailed view on what is going on with the volume.

As you can see, my drive is heavily fragmented. There is lot of useful information for you to see here, including how much of an improvement you would get from performing a defragmentation, in my case for access time alone I would gain a 4% improvement. 4% may not seem like a lot, but the volume in question doesn’t have that many files so – so imagine would it might be like if it was nearly full!

So now it’s probably time to run a manual defragmentation (again, if you are using automatic defragmentation you shouldn’t need to do this much). This time click on the defragment button. The first thing you will probably see is a screen warning you that VSS has been detected and asking you what you want to do, as shown below. I chose the default option which was to perform the defragment using the VSS defragmentation method. This reduces the chances of your shadow copies being overwritten and you potentially losing data. This is why you need disk defragmentation software that understands Windows Home Server!

Once you click continue the disk degragmentation will begin. Depending on the size of the volume, the amount of free space (as long as you have at least 1% free Diskeeper will do its magic) and the amount of file fragmentation, this process can take a while. You can watch the progress in real-time, which will quickly lose it’s appeal after about a minute. You can continue to use your home server while this is happening, but the more you use the files on that volume the longer it will take to perform.

After it has completed you can view a report and make sure you are happy with the results.

Final Thoughts: As you can probably imagine, your WHS will become heavily fragmented in a very short space of time, so in order to keep it running smoothly it’s a very good idea to run some defragmentation software on it. Just remember to only use WHS aware and supported software!

Diskeeper 2008 HomeServer edition is a great piece of software, that is fairly easy to install and requires very little configuration to keep your WHS ticking over smoothly, and is very easy to use.

For more information on Diskeeper 2008 HomeServer edition, including pricing, head over to www.diskeeper.com.

Source:? WGS

WHS, Windows Home Server, Diskeeper, HomeServer, Review, Defrag, Defragmentation, Microsoft

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