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Administration best practices
25 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Windows Server Best Practices | 680-042-007
Note: As a best practice, do not run defragmentation on SC Series volumes mapped to Windows hosts
because it can have a negative impact on the performance and effectiveness of Data Progression and
replication.
As a last step, drive optimizer will run reTRIM on the volume. Windows Server 2012 (with SCOS 6.7 and
newer) will automatically reclaim freed-up space on an SC Series NTFS volume using TRIM/Unmap. TRIM
commands are processed asynchronously by the file system to minimize any performance impact on the
underlying hardware. When space is freed up on a volume, the file system queues the TRIM requests to be
processed. In cases where the file system receives multiple TRIM requests, the file system may reach a
maximum queue size, and some TRIM requests could be dropped. Drive optimizer issues a reTRIM request
on the volume to reclaim any space that was missed by dropped TRIM commands. The reTRIM request is
processed in a way that limits the number of TRIM requests in the queue and avoids any dropped requests.
Note: TRIM and reTRIM are supported on SC Series volumes formatted as NTFS (Server 2012 and newer).
Because drive optimizer will periodically help to reclaim additional space on SC Series LUNs, leaving this
feature enabled is recommended.
To run the reTRIM process manually on SC Series LUNs, use the Optimize-Volume PowerShell command. In
the following example, a ReTrim command is issued on an SC Series volume that is mapped to a Windows
Server 2019 host as S:\. Use the –Verbose switch to output detailed information to the screen while the
command is running.
Example:
Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter S –ReTrim –Verbose
Optimize-Volume PowerShell command