Over the past several years we have seen a growing trend towards companies concentrating their efforts on protecting their computer network system from security breaches and the loss of personal information stored on their hard drive. Many of these companies have gone to great lengths to ensure their customers and clients as well as their employees remain guarded against such attacks and while these safeguards remain important it is just as imperative that these companies remain vigilant against other attacks that could severely damage their business.
For whatever reason most companies operate under the belief that their computer network system is only threatened by outside forces. This could be due in large part to the fact these threats are often the ones that gain the publicity but the truth is these network systems can just as easily be taken down by an internal issue.
One such problem that every business and company should be aware of is the computer disease known as fragmentation. While it may not garner the same kind of media attention as a hacker stealing personal information the results can be just as devastating.
Fragmentation originates on the hard drive and, if ignored, will quickly destroy a hard drive’s speed and eventually result in a crash. That end result often means the loss of all information that was once stored; a scenario no business wants to face.
Something all companies should be aware of is all hard drives are designed in the same manner in regard to how they save and store information. This means all hard drives are susceptible to fragmentation due to the method of saving and storing files.
This method places files in a contiguous order, meaning whenever a file is saved it is placed directly behind the previous file saved and so on. Because there is no space between these files there is no room for modifications and this presents serious problems down the road.
When one of these saved files is modified and then resaved the hard drive is not designed to move files around to make room for the larger file. Instead the hard drive takes the added information and stores it in the next available space, thus creating a fragmented file. While this may seem harmless enough it is important to realize a single file can be fragmented into thousands of pieces and this all effects the speed of the hard drive.
As the hard drive becomes more and more fragmented the speed of the computer begins to suffer. A clear sign that a hard drive has been damaged by fragmented files is its response time in completing simple tasks. If booting up a computer is taking a long time, loading pages and applications is met with delays, Internet browsing is sluggish or if accessing and sending emails is difficult then chances are the hard drive has serious issues with fragmentation.
The damage caused to a company due to fragmentation is obvious. When a company no longer operates at full speed their customers and clients begin to look elsewhere for their products and services.
Just as any disease progresses fragmentation will continue to worsen until the hard drive can no longer operate and it crashes. This crash will not slow a company’s operability, it will completely stop it. When faced with a computer crash there is little a company can do to restore the trust that their clients and customers have come to expect.
Fortunately there is an easy solution to preventing such a disaster from occurring. While hard drive’s are prone to fragmentation the installation of defragmentation software can quickly eradicate the dangers associated with the disease and keep the computer network system running at its peak speed.
Once installed, defrag will scan the hard drive for fragmented files and repair the files that have been splintered into pieces. Defrag will place all the pieces that belong to a single file together and save them in one space, eliminating the hard drives need to search for fragments that comprise one file. By doing this the computer network system is restored to reliability and the loss of information is eliminated.
In this day and age when companies place a large percentage of their trust in their computer network system is becomes increasingly important to ensure all measures are taken to keep that system healthy. The installation of defragmentation software is one such measure every company should implement.
