Nobody likes to do it. It takes a long time to complete depending on the size of your drive yet it is a necessary evil. I'm talking about Defragmenting your hard disks. I know how many of you feel about it. I used to feel the same way, believe me. However, letting your disks remain fragmented will reduce system speed and efficiency significantly. Most people will notice a 25 to 30% gain in system performance with a simple defragmentation of the primary drive! That's like upgrading from a 3 GHz CPU to a 3.4 GHz CPU!
Picture your hard disk as a deck of cards arranged in numerical order and by suit. You say you want the three of hearts, and the computer finds it for you quickly since everything is in a logical order. Now shuffle (fragment) the deck and ask for the same three of hearts. The computer will take significantly longer to find since everything is random. That is why we need to defrag our hard disks regularly. Windows comes with a means of doing this, but it is slow and eats up CPU usage making it virtually impossible to do anything else while defraging.
To make this necessary process easier and less evil, the great folks at Auslogics have given us Disk Defrag. This little gem is a stand alone disk defragmentation engine that performs the same function in a fraction of the time. You can even adjust the CPU usage depending on if you will be using the PC while defraging or not. I defraged my 160 Gb hard disk (which normally took approximately 12 hours to do with the windows tool) in 35 minutes!
Proper PC maintenance is so much easier to do when it hurts less.
Price: FREE
Size: 1.5 Mb
Download Auslogic's Disk Defrag Here: Disk Defrag
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2 comments:
I was amongst the never used to do it category until i had to delete stuff off the drive to make room for putting all those fragments back together. Once it was done, the result was definitely noticeable. The PC which had been crawling like a snail started responding much faster. I think fragmentation is a handicap for the drive, its robs the speed and performance even a state of the art drive is capable of.
Thanks for the comment!
The hard disk is the only permanent storage component of a computer that is mechanical and thus makes it the slowest part of the system. Someday, perhaps in the next 5 years, mechanical hard disks will be obsolete in lieu of huge flash disks. Back about 2 years ago, a 1 Gb flash drive was state of the art. Today, you can get them as high as 20 Gb. Also, with the drives residing directly on the bus, they'll be far faster than the flash and hard disk drives of today.
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