For an individual their computer offers a number of benefits including convenience and accessibility but for a business the importance of a reliable and efficient computer network system can be the difference between success and failure. Because of this there has been a special emphasis placed on the importance of maintaining the health of computer network systems and ensuring they operate at the highest level. To keep the integrity of a computer network system intact businesses invest quite a bit of time and money, hoping that their efforts will prevent a crash that could spell disaster for their company.
Popular thought would lead you to believe that the greatest threat to a computer’s operating system is a virus, an uninvited programming code often bent on infecting and destroying your hard drive and anything associated with it. While viruses are certainly a threat to a computer network’s performance and can do real damage if overlooked they may not be the most destructive force your computer will face.
That force could be the computer disease known as fragmentation. Unlike a virus, fragmentation occurs naturally on a computer’s hard drive. This means you don’t have to accidentally click a link or open a suspicious file to open the gates, fragmentation is a part of how your hard drive works. It may seem odd that a computer disease is part of a hard drive’s design but because of the value these hard drives place on space the issue is very real and potentially catastrophic.
In comparison to the space available on today’s hard drives what existed several years ago was relatively small. This meant that the effects of fragmentation became obvious a lot faster and because there was only a limited amount of space in which you could store your files the damage that could be done, while still significant, was somewhat limited. Today hard drives are equipped with a massive amount of space, capable of handling hundreds if not thousands of times the files that its predecessors handled. Just as the space multiplied so too did the potential for problems.
To understand how damaging fragmentation can be, especially for a business, step back and fully appreciate the computer disease. Over time fragmentation turns your once fast and reliable network into a cluttered mess of broken files, each individual mess acting as a serious roadblock to efficiency. What may have started as a minor inconvenience will, if left untreated, develop into a costly and devastating disease that compromises your business and threatens its very existence.
Inside a business the computer network system is much like the central nervous system, in charge of not just delivering a request but seeing that request turn into action. When a network becomes infested with fragmented files that delivery time can slow to a crawl and eventually the effort involved in that delivery becomes too great and the hard drive crashes. The reason businesses should be concerned is because more often than not the files available on their network system are used by multiple employees, increasing the amount of times that file becomes fragmented. There is no limit to how many pieces a file can be fragmented into so it is common for a single file to actually be broken into thousands of pieces and stored in different places on a hard drive.
Each time that file is recalled by an employee the hard drive is forced to gather up all of those pieces and deliver it to the screen, obviously a taxing process. Of course it’s not just one file that employees share but thousands and as these are all pulled up, modified and resaved the damage caused by fragmentation just multiplies. At that point you don’t just have slow network but a slow business, meaning your employees can no longer work at full capacity and this in turn means you can’t maintain a high level of service for your customers and clients.
Fortunately there is software like Diskeeper 2010 that is designed to not just stop fragmentation from occurring but actually repair the damaged files that exist on a hard drive and prevent the computer disease from returning. Defragmentation software has advanced along with the technology behind computers and the process of cleaning your hard drive no longer requires shutting down your network to make repairs. One of the most beneficial aspects of defragmentation software is that it now capable of doing its job while you continue to do yours.
Essentially a product like Diskeeper 2010 is an insurance policy against slow computer performance resulting from fragmentation. What makes this defragmentation software so valuable is that it doesn’t just repair your files once, it sticks around to keep your hard drive in line, making sure that future files are kept together to ensure that reliability and efficiency, a business’ best friend, remain in place.
Businesses entrust a large chunk of their future in their computer network system and if something as common as fragmentation is overlooked the walls can come crumbling down. With something as simple as defragmentation software readily available there really is no excuse to leaving your network system vulnerable to slowdowns and potential crashes. If you value your business you will value your information, protect it by keeping your hard drive free of fragmented files with defragmentation software.
