The 5 biggest myths of fragmentation
Myth #1: The built-in defragmenter that comes with Windows® is good enough for most situations because it can be scheduled.
Dealing with the issue of fragmentation is a core level concern for every system's performance and reliability levels. Preventing slows, hangs, crashes and shorter hardware life cannot, unfortunately, be handled with a freebie utility
even if it can be "scheduled". Here's why:
- Systems accumulate fragmentation continually. When the computer is busiest (relied upon the most), the rate of fragmentation is highest. Most people don’t realize how much performance is lost to fragmentation and how fast it can occur. To maintain efficiency, fragmentation must be eliminated as it happens. Only a defragmenter that works in real-time can accomplish this.
- Scheduling requires administrator planning. It's a nuisance on one system, on multiple machines it can be a real drain of management resources.
- Scheduled defrag times are often not long enough to get the job done.
Myth #2: Active defragmentation is a resource hog and must be scheduled off production times.
This was very true with regard to manual defragmenters. They had to run at high priority or risk getting continually bounced off the job. In fact, these defragmenters often got very little done unless allowed to take over the computer. When the built-in defragmenter became schedulable, not much changed. The defrag algorithm was slow and resource heavy. Built-in defragmenters were really designed for emergency defragmentation, not as a standard performance tool.
Ever since first released in 1994, Diskeeper® has been a "Set It and Forget It"®, schedulable defragmenter that backed off system resources needed by computer operations. Times have changed and a typical computer’s I/Os per second (IOPS) has accelerated a hundred fold. Because this drove the rate of fragmentation accumulation way up, Diskeeper Corporation saw the need for a true real-time defragmenter and developed a new technology, InvisiTasking®. This innovative breakthrough separates usable system resources into five areas capable of being accessed separately. As a result, robust, fast defrag can occur even during peak workload times – and even on the busiest and largest mission-critical servers.
Myth #3: Fragmentation is not a problem unless more than 20% of the files on the disk are fragmented.
The files most likely to be fragmented are precisely the ones relied upon the most. In reality, these frequently accessed files are likely fragmented into hundreds or even thousands of pieces. And they got that way very quickly. This degree of fragmentation can cost you 90% or more of your computer's performance when accessing the files you use most. Ever wonder why some Word docs take forever to load? Defragmented, they load in a flash. Work goes faster, backups, boot-ups and anti-virus scans are much improved.