HARD DRIVE FRAGMENTATION

Hard drive fragmentation continues to be an issue, even with today's intelligent systems. Hard drive fragmentation occurs when files are broken into small chunks and stored in various different physical areas on the hard drive in your system. If we think of a hard drive as a CD, with various curcular tracks going from the inside to the outside of the disk, then we can think of fragmentation as having portions of your files stored in varying areas within a track as well as on different tracks altogether.

The issue that fragmentation raises is one of system performance. If a file - say a word processing document; a spreadsheet; a song; or even an application - is written to disk in one long strand of information on a single track on the hard drive then accessing that file in future would be a relatively quick process. If the same file is broken into chunks and spread out over different areas on the hard drive, then the read-write head on the drive has to move to different areas to get at the data when its needed. The more moves the read-write head needs to make, the longer it takes to open the file. Given that file sizes today can be quite significant and that the hard drive is the only mechanical part inside a computer (and therefore the slowest part) keeping your hard drive operating as quickly as it can means noticeable speed differences across your entire system.

Hard drive defragmentation should be done on a regular basis - once per week at a minimum - to ensure high levels of performance of your hard drive sub-systems. There are a number of utilities available to help defragment hard drives, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

Call us to discuss how we can help you improve your system performance and help you get the most power and value from your systems.

For more information, please contact:

CG Technologies Corporation
http://www.cgtechnologies.com