Employee Productivity: Dont Let Fragmentation Be A Factor

It can be tough enough keep employees productive, with things like chatting between cubicles, texting to the wife, husband, girlfriend or boyfriend when the boss isn’t looking, answering personal emails, chuckling over and passing on the latest joke, surfing the web, and endless others. The last thing you need is to have your computer system contributing to lower productivity because of hard drive failures–especially when they can be easily prevented.

Such failures can cause work stoppage all across an enterprise, especially when the drive or drives involved are on a server that serves the entire operation. A supervisor might look up to check on his or her subordinates and, with a bit of internal panic, wonder why they’re just sitting there staring at their screens. Suddenly sales are not being made because prospect and customer data is not readily available. Suddenly accounts are not generating invoices for payment. Suddenly shipping has come to a dead standstill because no orders are coming their way. Of course, the cost to a company in such circumstances can be fantastic. And if a backup has not occurred recently–many companies only perform weekly backups–that cost is greatly compounded by data that needs to be manually restored.

There are a number of factors that can contribute to hard drive failure, but a major cause is the wear and tear caused by file fragmentation. When a file is fragmented into tens, hundreds or thousands of fragments, access to that file can take a substantial number of I/O requests. Not only is performance slowed down dramatically, but the thrashing about of the disk read-write head removes years of life off of a hard drive, causing it to fail well short of the life IT expected for it.

Many companies have implemented scheduled defragmentation solutions to make sure drives are defragmented. But what system administrators in these companies may not know is that despite scheduled defragmentation, hard drives are still experiencing unnecessary wear and tear. This is because scheduled defragmentation has become outmoded and is no longer tackling fragmentation adequately. Because file sizes have become enormous and disk capacities have so greatly increased, fragmentation builds up far quicker than it used to. In between scheduled runs, fragmentation continues to impact performance and continues to reduce hard drive life.

In order to keep and extend hard drive life in today’s computing environment, a fully automatic defragmentation solution is required. This is a solution that defragments whenever idle computer resources are available. It also utilizes the appropriate defragmentation method for the drive being defragmented, and the severity of fragmentation. Since it is fully automatic, it also requires no scheduling, eliminating another time-consuming chore from an already-full IT task list.

With the speed of today’s business, it is essential that hard drives be kept reliable. Automatic defragmentation is one sure way to do that.