Automatic Defrag: The Indispensable Tool

Ask any tradesperson, and you’re likely to find that each has an indispensable tool, one he or she simply cannot do without. For some contractors it might be a hammer, for electricians it might be wire cutters, for a carpenter it might be a particular chisel, but one for one it’s that single implement they would feel lost without.

For many systems administrators, that tool is Diskeeper with InvisiTasking–the only fully automatic defrag solution. File fragmentation begins to slow performance right from software installation, and quickly escalates from there. Hence, installing Diskeeper when deploying a server means that the server will run with maximum performance and reliability from the beginning and throughout its life.

“We have been using Diskeeper going all the way back to our first NT servers,” said Jim Colunio, Network Systems Administrator with Elmira College in Elmira, New York. “Diskeeper has kept my disks running effectively for years and has saved me on a number of occasions. One disk’s worth of data saved is definitely worth my return on investment.”

File fragmentation–the fact of a file broken up into pieces (fragments) to better fit on a disk–occurs with all computers. Because files are constantly being written, deleted and resized, fragmentation is a natural occurrence. File reads and writes take longer, but fragmentation’s effects are far more widespread: slow performance, long boot-times, random crashes and freeze-ups–even a complete inability to boot up at all. Many users blame these problems on the operating systems, when disk fragmentation is often the real culprit.

Colunio spoke to Diskeeper’s value. “For me, Diskeeper has become an indispensable tool and no server build would be complete without Diskeeper installed,” he said.” I use Diskeeper to achieve the cleanest initial build that I can get before the server goes live.”

Utilizing a proprietary technology called InvisiTasking, Diskeeper works invisibly, in the background, utilizing resources that would otherwise be idle. There is no negative performance hit by the defrag process, and performance is always maximized. Server maintenance can drain priceless resources and time, and until now, the solution to fragmentation required balancing of scheduled tasks. Diskeeper cuts those issues off at the pass–allowing servers to fire on all cylinders and zoom through once-cumbersome operations as never before.