Defragmentation

By Joshua Erdman
Digital Foundation, inc.

As files get created and deleted from your computer's hard drive they get fragmented. That means a file that your computer is loading could be scattered in pieces in different areas about the drive resulting in very poor reading performance.

What Causes Defragmentation?

Imagine your computer's hard drive and all the space it can store as a single piece of paper that you must write on for everything you want to remember. This paper would hold items like your name, phone number, address, your spouce's info, and probably where you work. You would also put temporary items on it like a grocery list, the time and location of your kid's next soccer match, and what you want to eat for dinner.

Since EVERYTHING you need to remember must be kept on this piece of paper, it will get filled up really fast. Hopefully you remembered to write in pencil so you can erase information that expires.

Now imagine what your piece of paper looks like after using it for a week; it is written all over the place, there are bits and pieces of blank areas where you have erased expired information and you might even have to scatter your grocery list all over the paper to get it to fit.

At this point, we can say with confidence that your paper has data that is fragmented. Just to read your grocery list you need to look in several different areas and this is definitley time consuming. The same thing happens for hard drives.

Fixing File Fragmentation

Running a disk defragmentation program is a great way to improve hard drive performance. These programs vary in complexity but the most basic feature is to find files that are not in one piece, they are fragmented and scattered about the hard drive. The program will then find a space large enough for the whole file and move all the pieces to one spot. This allows the computer to read each file sequentially.

Clue: It is a good idea to free up some disk space before you start a defrag. This will make room to reassemble the fragmented files and can make the process go much faster. The rule of thumb is to have at least 15% of hard drive space free for maximum defragmentation performance.

Defragmenting Programs

Windows XP comes with its own disk defragmenter that provides basic disk cleanup. This is satisfactory if you want to run a defragmentation manually every time. You can also purchase a more advanced software called Diskeeper. Diskeeper Home is an advanced defragmenting program that can even clean up the swap file and runs automatically. The professional version also comes with PushInstall and network scheduling capability.

Clue: The Defrag program that comes with Windows was actually made by Diskeeper SEVERAL years ago. It was designed for Hard Drive up sizes up to around 3 GB. Things have changed alot since then and the Diskeeper defrag software today utilizes the new algorithms for today's larger drives.

Using Diskeeper

Diskeeper Pro is by far the best program to use on small business and corporate networks. Running Diskeeper improves performance and can expand the lifespan of each PC. With its networking capability, disk maintenance can be scheduled and managed from the adminsitrative utility.

Clue: Disk defragmentation not only speeds up how fast your computer can read files but also improves writing times by making free space on the harddrive contiguous.

At the minimum this program should be installed on ALL servers. With the amount of storage on a typical server, it could take hours to run a disk check or defrag. If the repair is severe enough the server may have to be taken offline. I had a server one time with a 76 GB partition that got corrupted, and after taking it offline for the whole weekend it still never finished its checkdisk. We eventually had to migrate off that machine and rebuild it.

With programs like Diskeeper, you can maintain clean drives on a scheduled basis and minimize downtime.

Article last reviewed: 11/15/2005

Created by: Digital Foundation, inc.

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