For many of us, it has become routine to replace a slow workstation or server. We recall how fast it used to be, but are unable to determine the cause of this increased system performance slowdown. Of course, instead of replacing them, we should simply defrag them.
The scenario is typical. When brand new, these business machines are the envy of any corporate office. They help increase employee production and company viability. However, sooner than we would like, it is observed that these relatively new systems begin showing signs of unbearable slowdown. It is determined that based on the average lifespan, they should be replaced. Shortly thereafter, the above scenario repeats itself… adding an increased dent to your corporate budget.
Of course, this is a common misconception that occurs daily in corporate America. With strict corporate security policies in place to keep viruses and such at bay, we are convinced that our network will generally be able to maintain an ideal and consistent performance level. Unfortunately, we soon discover that this simply isn’t the case. Eventually, employees begin to feel the effects of a mysterious illness that plagues every hard drive across the network, wreaking havoc on files and system performance. This illness is commonly referred to as fragmentation.
Fragmentation is when whole files are broken up into numerous pieces and scattered across hard drives. This causes increasingly poor file performance because it forces our systems to check countless locations on its hard drives for pieces of the file a user is trying to access.
It has been proven that fragmentation occurs on all workstations and servers, regardless of how minimal their usage. In fact, Diskeeper Corporation, developers of Diskeeper defrag software, recently ran a two week experiment using only Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word. The test was performed using an ordinary workstation and began with zero excess file fragments. The results showed that without defrag software, over 4,500 file fragments were generated in that short two week period. More details regarding this experiment are contained in the Myths of Fragmentation feature at Diskeeper’s website.
Defragmentation software such as the newly released Diskeeper 2007, with its ground breaking InvisiTasking technology, is the only truly automatic defrag solution to tackle this increasingly critical issue. But, don’t take my word for it. Visit a search engine, such as Google, search for “system performance” and download system performance software. Just install it and observe as overall system performance and employee production begin to increase.
Enforcing effective security policies on our workstations and servers is definitely a good practice in protecting them, but you will find that these great tools for processing information still can and will experience system performance slowdowns even with these regulations in place.
