To understand the act defrag, one needs to understand the basic working of computer system and hard disk. The computer system deals the data with two kinds of memory. One is temporary memory (RAM) and the other is permanent memory of the hard disk. When you save some work it goes in to permanent memory from temporary memory.



The Hard disk is the place permanent memory in a computer system. It contains a rotating disk and writing/reading arm. Depending upon the type of disk this arm can read data on both sides of the disk surface. The hard disk surface is divided in to clusters, where the saved data is written. The speeds of Hard disks are so high that these arms can not a write single file continuously on a single or adjoining clusters. One more factor for that is that particular cluster may be already filled with useful data. So every file is saved in different clusters, at different places of hard disk as fragments. This is called Disk fragmentation. It is very natural in every system as files are constantly being written, deleted and resized. A fragmented hard disk consumes more time to read and write, thus decreasing system speeds.

Defragmentation is a process to bring those files to adjoining clusters as far as possible and make them in to small number of pieces. It allows storage to be used more efficiently and reduces data access time considerably. Defragmentation not only increases the speed of the system, but also stops some other severe problems like long boot-times, random crashes etc. A defragmented hard disk works at its maximum speed assuring you peak performance.

Server performance mostly depends on hard disk, their fastness in delivering data. Without that multiple processors and additional memory are not much of use. A fragmented hard drive acts as a data bottleneck and makes the system slower.

Some operating systems defragment storage automatically at specified time intervals; others require user inter action. Users have to use a special system utility for this purpose occasionally. Microsoft says that its NTFS file system introduced in Windows NT was designed to minimize fragmentation. Of course it is not so true. Windows 98 has a system tool called defragmenter and this tool is more sophisticated in Windows XP. But some system administrators use third party tolls like ?Disk keeper? to do this job.

The systems administrator's first duty is to tune the performance. It can be fun but it is also a challenge. Most of the times, System administrator faces a tug-of-war between tight budgets which force him to delay new system purchases and new applications which demand more from the systems. So he has to find a cost effective tool to extract maximum performance from the available systems. The tool which can help him is the effective disk defragmetor. One can recognize considerable performance gains by reducing the number of file fragments on his server disks. So the Disk defragmentor is a compulsory tool for a system administrator.