NetWare uses elevator seeking to reorder disk requests for reads and writes so that NetWare can make clean sweeps across the disk. In theory, defragmentation utilities should not be necessary. Nevertheless, some customers have reported benefits from a defragmentation of a drive that has seen a lot of activity over.

NetWare uses elevator seeking to read and write to disks. NetWare stores requests for disk access, reorders these requests so that they may be accessed across the drive in clean sweeps and then performs the reads and writes. This should minimize the need to defragment files. However, if an administrator feels a disk defragmentation is needed, one of two things can be done:

1.) Reorder and reassemble files contiguously: the volume must be backed up, deleted, recreated and restored.

2.) Obtain a NetWare aware disk defragmenter. PC utilities will not work in NetWare, shared environments. No utilities like this are curretly tested and approved in a Novell environment. Backup your volumes first.

Keywords: Defrag, fragmented defragmentation, broken up, slow access, reorder