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With the decreasing costs associated with today’s bandwidth technologies, a high speed connection can easily be had by every corporation. Of course, proper implementation of defrag software ensures speedy downloads remain consistent.
Generally, even with a broadband connection, sluggish file transfers can still occasionally occur. Now, while most of these download issues are related to latency and bandwidth, there is another critical factor involved…fragmentation.
Despite the number of employees or file transfers within an organization, it’s a fact that fragmentation can and will occur on a daily basis. More details regarding this can be found in the Impact of Disk Fragmentation article, written by Joe Kinsella for Windows® IT Pro Magazine.
Fragmentation can be broken down into the following two categories:
1. Whole files that are broken into numerous pieces and scattered across hard drives.
2. Free space on hard drives that is broken into various sections across the drives.
Now, when a new file is downloaded, regardless of origin, the operating system has to quickly locate a section of free space for the file to reside. However, if the designated gap of free space is smaller in size than the file in question, the excess part of the file spills into the next available piece of free space. This creates increased fragmentation and therefore signifies the need to defrag.
Let’s take a look at how fragmentation affects downloads over the Internet. We’ll use a popular web browser, Internet Explorer®, for our example.
When a user downloads a file from the net, such as a software package, it is initially copied to a temporary location on the computer before being transferred to the intended location once the file download process completes. Now, depending on the current level of fragmentation, the time necessary to actually download and copy the file to the appropriate location can be dramatically increased. Thus, we can easily see how fragmentation can slowdown Internet downloads.
The very same phenomenon hinders file transfers over a local network as well. With the immeasurable number of internal file transfers that occur daily in corporate America, the affects of fragmentation can be staggering.
Today, many small businesses depend on a single file server to handle the workload of their entire organization. In such a scenario, fragmentation soon occurs on a large scale due to frequent local file transfers and modifications. As you might expect, this puts a damper on production and, in some cases, can bring it to a halt completely.
Of course, there is hope. Defrag software, such as Diskeeper® by Diskeeper Corporation, addresses these concerns entirely. During a defrag job, Diskeeper hunts down, collects and consolidates scattered pieces of free space. This enables bulky files to download and settle onto the hard drive without the need to “break apart” to accommodate countless small areas of free space. This, of course, prevents fragmentation. On top of this, Diskeeper Corporation (diskeeper.com) has also recently partnered with Akamai Technologies, Inc., a leading distributed computing solutions and services company, to help ensure software purchased online from Diskeeper is delivered with maximum reliability and speed.
While a broadband connection can definitely increase production, fragmentation can make routine downloads feel like dialup. Without defrag software, a business can end up stalled on the Information Superhighway.
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Graeme.Taylor[.]pixel.com.au 
