Can an external usb drive be used for available space for an offline defrag?If not, will adding another drive to the server be an option?

A USB drive is going to be horribly slow. Another hard drive would be much better.

rather add other drive, is faster and more secure than usb.GrettingsGerardo Espinosa

Yes you can but try to use a faster USB 2.0 or higher and the first Major is the size Microsoft recomends free space over 110% than you db size http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/192185 Regards A.Karam MCSE Messaging

I did this with Exchange 2003. I took the databases offline and moved the files to another server with enough disk space and ran the offline defrag there. If I remember correctly you can run the utilities on a server without exchange installed on it by just copying the exe and dll's needed. There should be some articles if you google it on how to do this.

technically speaking you can defrag to an external USB drive you can even defrag to a network location if you want. USB 2.0 is not THAT slow of course it depends on the size of your databaseFull time IT consultant since 1998 mainly on Exchange\ISA\AD MCSE NT4.0,2000/2003, CCNA MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator 2007/2010 MCT since 2001

Can we back up a little? Why are you doing an offline defrag?You'd be better off moving the mailboxes out of the store and then just deleting it.

the 500GB partition that is home to the email database has only 28GB of free space. My intent was to have the users archive a good portion of their and then perform an offline defrag to recapture the space. I am not familiar with moving the mailboxes out of the store and then deleting it. Is there a write up on performing this procedure?

28 GB is a good amount of space you have left, don't bother losing time with offline defraging a 4.5GB store this will take too long. do the cleaning you wanna do and let the database as is, the free space wont be "given back" to the system but your DB won't grow anymore and use the internally freed amount of space instead. Unless you have another partition (other than the 500 we are talking about) moving users to another database won't work in your case, you don't have enough free space to accommodate it. if you have another partition you can use the idea is to 1) create a new storage group 2) create a mailbox store in it 3) move mailboxes from the initial storage group to the new one 4) delete the old storage group If you need more info we need to know if you are running exchange 2003 / 2007 or 2010Full time IT consultant since 1998 mainly on Exchange\ISA\AD MCSE NT4.0,2000/2003, CCNA MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator 2007/2010 MCT since 2001

Is the single database almost 500GB? If so, it needs to be split up into smaller databases anyhow.You could do that with USB disk, but it would be pretty risky.How about adding a cheap iSCSI device to the network and configuring a LUN for Exchange?

the database partition is 500GB with 28GB free and the free space is diminishing. it was at 28.9 last week it is now at 28.3 I have started to archive users email that is 6months to hopefully slow down the rate of space consumption and eventually stop it. I am using a third party email achiver application - Sunbelt to be exactshould I not still defrag the database after all said is done in order to recapture the space freed after the archiving has completed? I am running Exchange2003 Enterprise on WindowsServer 2003 sp2their are no more bays available to add another physical drive to the server

if your database is >450GB, you shouldn't attempt to defrag it even if you do delete a bunch of content. You'll wait days and days.Understand you can't add direct-attach storage, but a small iscsi would go a long way. You have enterprise edition, so you can create more storage groups and databases. You really don't have room to do /anything/ on the local disk.my concern with USB is first that it's slow, and second that it's a single point of failure. you don't want to get partway in to a move or even a defrag and have a problem with that drive. typical consumer-class USB is more likely to have issues too.