RAID5, to defrag or not to defrag?....

I've been running a RAID5 array on my server for some time now, maybe 3 year with my current 4TB array. In tests it can top just over 400MB's read, however I am now running my weekly backup and its coping a large 15GB rar file at 40MB's. The backup disk can write at around 120MB's from what I've seen. So I'm wondering if my RAID5 array may be fragmented. So can anyone tell me if its useful to defrag a RAID5 array? I'm not sure how it would work since it's the RAID card that sees the individual disks and Windows just sees it as one large volume... Any input guys?

Defrag would work just fine though I am not certain that is your issue. I don't know what it is but I havent seen a defrag do that much good ever.

You can defrag if you like, but very little program performance will be gained. You'll defrag for hours to gain milliseconds in access time. IMO, not worth it.

How old are the drives? You sure they're just not getting tired?

EDIT- Dam. Joe snuck me.

Thanks for the advice. The drives were all made in 2010.

As long as the RAID is made of mechanical drives, it will benefit from defragging. How much depends on how much the data is scattered around the drive. If it has to hunt and peck for larger files (it's severely fragmented), defragmentation would help quite a lot. I schedule defrags on my mechanical drives, and if my server's RAID array were something I could defrag, I would.

Thanks Thideras, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. I have never defragmented the array in years now :/

If you are running W7 or greater, it should automatically be dfreagging unless you disabled it...

The server is running MS Windows Server 2012R2. The built in defrag in disabled and Auslogics disk defrag is installed, however it looks like I did not set up a automatic defrag schedule for any hard disk. :/ Oppps.