We often assume that with each new step in the advancement of our computer’s performance abilities we move further away from the problems of the past. Unfortunately this just isn’t true; in fact those problems in the past have actually become more prevalent today than ever. This is particularly evident when examining how information is stored on a computer’s hard drive.
Years ago a computer’s hard drive was capable of storing what many would consider a minimal amount of files but today that has changed dramatically. Hard drives in today’s computers now have the ability to save a staggering amount of files and while this has alleviated some problems it has only made the troubles associated with fragmentation more obvious.
These troubles can quickly become the death of your computer as fragmentation can be a fatal computer disease, causing your hard drive to crash and wiping out all the information you have stored. In the past the problems presented by fragmentation became obvious much faster as the hard drive’s limited amount of space was quickly filled and a computer’s speed and functionality suffered. With today’s hard drives those problems simply mount, becoming more methodical as your computer’s performance abilities slowly deteriorate. The end result is the same- a complete crash yet this time it’s even more information that is lost.
All of these problems are tied to how your hard drive stores temporary and permanent files. By design they are saved in a contiguous manner, placed one after the next in the order they are saved with no space left between the files. What this means is that when you recall a file, make changes and then resave the information it no longer fits in its original space. Your hard drive’s solution is to then cut the excess information and store it in the next available space thus producing a fragmented file.
Because there is no limit to how many times a file can be fragmented you may have hundreds if not thousands of pieces of a single file littered across your hard drive. Each time you try to pull that file up it requires your hard drive to search for all of those pieces before it can be delivered to you and this is can cause a serious delay. That delay isn’t the worst part of it though as you are actually making your computer work a lot harder than it wants and over time this overload becomes too much and that is when you experience a crash.
The damage done by fragmentation isn’t exclusive to a single computer as businesses operating on a network can experience the same kind of damage and in reality it can be even worse. Think of how many times a file is pulled up in a single day by multiple employees, each time that occurs that file becomes fragmented into more pieces and eventually your network becomes bogged down by fragmentation, an obvious contributor to inefficiency.
Luckily we don’t have to rely on our hard drive to keep itself protected from fragmentation as there are a number of products like Diskeeper 2010 that serve as defragmentation software. Designed specifically to repair files and restore your computer’s speed this defragmentation software brings your computer back to a healthy state of operation and protects it from future fragmentation.
Simply put defragmentation software searches your hard drive for those fragmented pieces of a file, places them together and then saves them in one space. When that file is recalled, modified and resaved it remains intact meaning the next time you recall the file it won’t require that lengthy delay as your hard drive searches for the pieces.
Just as you would heed the advice to protect your computer from potential risks associated with viruses you should always ensure your hard drive is equipped with defragmentation software to remedy the issue of fragmentation and restore your computer’s integrity.
