The defragger that comes with Windows will totally rape your disk subsystem for I/O's. This might not be a problem if this is just a file server, but that's a huge interruption to a database server where I/O throughput is more critical than data transfer throughput.
If it's not a highly I/O intensive server, just do the defrag during peak idle times when the server is least likely to be impacted.
If I/O's are seriously important, than you wouldn't even want Microsoft's defragger, as it does a half-assed job anyway.
The de-facto standard in disk defragmentation is Diskeeper. Diskeeper has an I/O monitor and will only defrag when it determines that its own I/O usage will not impact performance. That's not just lip service either. It does a damn good job at taming its own resource usage when necessary. Most of the time you won't even know it's running, and it automatically keeps the system in a defragged state at all times.
As a bonus, it has a complete scheduler feature so you can set it to only defrag at certain times or certain days of the week. It also has a remote administrator console.
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by: nprignanoPosted on 2008-09-17 at 13:45:29ID: 22503462
I have always used DIskeeper for automatic defragmenting on my servers. Best practice is to defragment when the system/data is not in use, and defragmented data is always easier to backup than fragmented data. I have seen Backup Exec fail due to data that is heavily fragmented, and I have also seen backups take twice as long when data is fragmented vs defragmented.