Why you should run disk defrag

When you first buy a PC it seems nice and fast, everything happens so quickly. Then over a period of time it seems to start to get slower and slower. Why is that?

Disk Fragmentation

Part of the answer is disk fragmentation. When you first get your PC the disk is nice and clean and ordered, then you start using it to browse the web, download files, install software, write documents etc.

Each time you use your PC files get written to the disk and then, generally, deleted when you close the files. Web browsers ‘cache’ images in case they are used again on the site, this is done to improve the performance of the pages so that the web browser doesn’t have to download the same image multiple times.

As the files get written and delete and new files get written again they don’t always fit neatly on your disk, so they start to leave spaces. The next time a file is written it tries to fill in the spaces. If the file is larger than the space then part of the file is written in the space and the rest of it is written in another space – so that file is now fragmented. The larger a file is the greater the chance that it will become fragmented. That is why you should run a Disk Defrag on a regular basis, to keep your computer working at its optimum and as fast as when it was new.

How do I know I need a Disk Defrag?

In the example here the black colour is the free, or empty, space on the disk.

Black: empty
Green: regular files, un-fragmented
Dark green: spacehogs, un-fragmented
Yellow: fragmented
Red: unmovable
White: busy
Pink: MFT reserved zone (NTFS only)
Gray: in use by unknown data

So you can see that not all of the free space is in a nice contiguous area, it is spread through the disk. There are also some files, in yellow, which are fragmented and need to be de-fragmented to improve performance.

The reason that fragmented files slow your computer down is to do with the way that disk drives work and how they access their data. If you have a loose leaf file with 50 sheets of paper in it that are in sequential order its very easy to read through the document. If however the pages are all out of order it takes you much longer to read the document, as you need to keep moving backwards and forwards through the file. This is exactly what happens when a file on your computer is fragmented, so it takes the disk longer to read all of the data and assemble it for you. The same is true when the file is saved if the disk has to keep stuffing little bits of the file into small spaces and remember where it has put everything.

How to run a Disk Defrag

Disk Defrag on Workstations & Laptops

Windows XP, Windows 7  & Vista have defragmentation programs built into them. On an XP machine you have to run the program manually, on Vista or Windows 7 it will schedule itself to run every so often.  The problem is that on most office systems the schedule will probably be due to take place outside office hours, when the machine is turned off.  You should de-fragment your disks on a regular basis. How often you should de-fragment your disk depends on how much you use your computer and how full the disks are. For most people every month will be sufficient, if you have a lot of files changing on your computer with downloads etc then you may want to do this more frequently.

Disk Defrag on Servers

Servers suffer from Disk Fragmentation in the same way that workstations do. In some ways its worse on servers as they tend to be file repositories for lots of users. The problem here is that Microsoft doesn’t make it simple to schedule a disk defrag on a server, so in most cases you need to use an external utility to do this. Also files cannot be defragmented when they are open, so if you runs a Database or Mail Server you will need to stop these applications to be able to fully defragment your disks. Most of the Managed Service Providers, or IT Outsourcers can automate this process for you so that these tasks take place outside business hours.

Defrag Utilities

A couple of good Free Disk Defrag utilities are:-

MyDefrag – www.myDefrag.com works on XP, Vista, Windows7 and the Windows Server range. This includes everything from Windows 2000 through to Windows 2008. MyDefrag was previously known as JKDefrag,

MyDefrag is written by the same person who wrote the original JKDefrag..

Defraggler from Piriform www.piriform.com works on XP, Vista, Windows7 and the Windows Server range. This includes everything from Windows 2000 through to Windows 2008. Piriform produce several other products which help to improve the performance of your computer, the best known of which is cCleaner.

Both MyDefrag and Defraggler are available as free downloads. Make sure that you read and accept the End User License Agreement (EULA), this is true for any software product – even though most people never bother.

Automating the Disk Defrag Process

If you like the idea of having your disk defragmented on a regular basis but don’t feel comfortable doing this then SystemAssure can help to get round this and keep by your computer working at its peak performance creating an automated schedule for your disk to de-fragment. If the computer is powered off we can, in most cases, wake the PC up, de-fragment the disk and then put the computer back to sleep again. If you are running an Exchange Server we can stop Exchange before we defragment the disks and restart it once the defrag is completed. You will also recieve a report on the process.

Find out more about how SystemAssure can automate your disk defrag at www.SystemAssure.co.uk

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