Fragmented
hard drives aren't the horror they used to be. In fact,
with the advent of the NTFS file system (available under
Windows NT, 2000 and XP) combined with Pentium 4 processors
and 7500 rpm hard drives, it's debatable whether defragmentation
is ever required more often than a few times per year on
most newer systems. Nevertheless, thrashing hard drives
searching for heavily fragmented and otherwise inefficiently
stored data eventually take their toll on computer system
performance, particularly data read and write times.
What's
fragmentation? Simply put, saving a file uses a certain
amount of track and sector area on a hard drive. Open the
same file and add information. As long as there is room
on the original track and sector at the end of the original
file location to store the new information, no fragmentation
occurs. But if other data has been written there, the additional
data for your current file has to be stored elsewhere on
the hard drive. Sometimes the next available location on
the hard drive is not large enough for your current data.
In that case only some of the data is written and yet another
fragment of the file is placed in yet another location.
And so on. All this used to be a huge problem because of
the time it took the old, slow drives to read and write
data. If you didn't defragment your hard drives on a regular
basis, systems could slow to a crawl. The worst of the
problems seem to be a thing of the past.
Large
networks with hundreds of computers are another matter.
Individual computers on large networks may only slow down
due to fragmentation by a percentage point or two - hardly
noticable. But if you add up all of the tiny slowdowns
on each of several hundred computers, significant inefficiencies
appear - the overall effect is much larger and clearly
measurable. That's where Defrag Manager comes in.
Winternals
Software has designed Defrag Manager to simplify the defragmentation
of large enterprise networks. The software appears to work
as advertised. It doesn't have to be installed on each
computer on the network and allows systems administrators
to defragment entire Windows domains or Active Directory
Organizational Units through a drag-and-drop interface.
The software automatically deploys a small agent program
on each computer as scheduled defrag jobs begin. The agent
program automatically removes itself after the defrag process
is complete.
