There's nothing like having to replace something before it's time. When a car, for example, starts breaking down four years after purchase, the owner unexpectedly has to pull together the financing for another vehicle and go through the painful lease or purchase process. Or a television goes out right in the middle of your favorite program when you fully expected it to last at least another two years. It seems nothing lasts as long as it used to—and it can be an expensive surprise.

This can be also true of computers, and in business it can be as expensive as or even more expensive than some car or a television. A company budgets its funds for a quarter or for a year, and having an unexpected hardware failure necessitating a replacement or upgrade turns that budget on its ear. It becomes imperative for an IT department to maintain that hardware and get as much life out of it as possible—and when it comes to hard drives, file fragmentation can rob a good portion of that life.

A hard drive is the only computer component that has mechanical, moving parts that can break down. Every time a file is requested, a read/write head must move across the disk platters and retrieve that file, and file fragmentation adds additional movements for every fragment. Because the free space on a drive is also fragmented, the same holds true for writing a file: the read/write head will have to keep moving until it has written all the fragments of a file in the free spaces available.

Many companies have implemented scheduled defrag to make sure drives are defragmented. But what system administrators in these companies may not know is that despite scheduled defragmentation, hard drives are still experiencing unnecessary wear and tear. Because file sizes have become enormous and disk capacities have so greatly increased, fragmentation builds up far quicker than it used to. In between scheduled runs, fragmentation continues to impact performance and continues to reduce hard drive life—and in some instances, as in the case of very large drives, the defragmenter isn't even addressing the fragmentation problem.

An automatic defrag solution solves this problem, restoring that life and allows hardware to be used even longer than expected.

“I am still able to use five-year-old equipment even for software development and builds, simply because they are so highly optimized with automatic defrag software I use,” said Neil Beesely, network administrator with Integrated Medicine PS in Bremerton, Washington. “In addition to defragmenting data files we are particularly grateful for being able to defragment MFT and page files easily.”

Beesely has been able to address his fragmentation issues with automatic defragmentation. These include software build environments that suffer severe fragmentation problems, software test environments using VMware that also suffer severe fragmentation, and admin and secretarial workstations where he can prevent unnecessary slowdowns and avoid hardware upgrades.

File fragmentation takes a serious toll on hard drives. The right defrag technology, counteracts that toll and ensures hard drives last through their expected life spans and beyond.