Automobiles have greatly evolved since 1893, when the first gasoline-powered car took to the road in the United States. With a single-cylinder 4-horsepower engine, the vehicle was literally a horse-drawn buggy to which the builder added an engine and removed the horse. Today, sleek aerodynamically designed vehicles fly down the highway, their high-tech humming engines and even suspension, steering, fuel control and many other factors computer controlled.
But from the first car to the most recent, despite the many and varied developments that propelled them down the road from low to breakneck speeds, they have always needed oil to run smoothly. And as long as there are engines with moving parts, they always will.
A similar statement can be made, believe it or not, for computers and defragmentation solutions. At various times throughout the years, especially when a breakthrough with either CPU or disk drive technology has occurred, the phrase, “fragmentation is no longer a problem” has surfaced. It has always turned out to be a falsehood; those who have made these statements were missing the basic facts of hard drive operation. No matter the level of sophisticated technology, defragmentation will always be a requirement, as a recent article details.
While storage technologies, such as seek optimization and disk queuing shorten seek times and reduce wear on the drive, the basic unit being retrieved with each I/O request is still a data block. Data is still stored on hard drives in a fragmented fashion; hence, it will still require additional I/Os to retrieve a fragmented file. The same can be said of RAID technology; while striping makes file seeks and retrievals faster, if the basic data is fragmented, performance is still greatly slowed. Even advanced caching methods are crippled by fragmentation; before data can be cached, it must be retrieved from the disk, and if the data is fragmented, it remains a slow process.
The key to maintaining peak performance of all such technologies is the automatic defragmentation provided by Diskeeper with InvisiTasking. Working invisibly in the background, utilizing otherwise-idle resources, Diskeeper defragments in real time so that performance is always maintained. There is never a negative performance hit from defragmentation, and no scheduling is ever required.
Just as the most advanced automobiles will always require oil, the most advanced computer systems and sophisticated storage technologies will always require Diskeeper.
Contact: Colleen Toumayan
Email: ctoumayan@diskeeper.com
