Benefits of Defragmentation

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What are the benefits of defragmentation? In the Maine District Court example above, instead of requiring twenty minutes to shut down a server, the process took forty-five seconds after defragmentation. File access times dropped from ten seconds to one to three seconds, and the MIS department reported many hours saved through faster backups. In addition, a study by IDC recently highlighted the fact that regular defragmentation enhances performance and can also lengthen the lifespan of a machine. IDC estimates that enterprises can add up to two additional years of life to the normal three-year usable life of workstations (see IDC white paper, Disk Defragmentation for Windows NT/ 2000, http://www.execsoft.com). Let us take a closer look at why regular defragmentation extends the life of hard drives. It takes the head one I/O to read or write a contiguous file. If a file is in 100 pieces, the head has to move 100 times to access it. If this is occurring every time a file is read or written to disk, the head and associated moving parts are effectively having to perform 100 times more work than would be required for a fragment-free file. The result is more wear and tear on the disk and an earlier failure.

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