FRAGMENTATION INPACTING NEW GENERATION OF COMPUTERS.

If you're an IT professional --or even just a longtime computer user -- you probably have an inkling that today's multi-gigabyte, high capacity desktop and laptop computers succumb to performance problems faster than those of just a few years ago.

Actually, it isn't just a gut feeling. It's a fact.

The ever-increasing demand for data storage, combined with the exponential growth in storage capacity (it's not unusual these days to find models for sale featuring multi-terabyte hard drive arrays) have made disk fragmentation Public Enemy Number One in the fight for computer efficiency.

Disk fragmentation -- the storage of a single digital file in multiple, non-adjacent clusters on a hard disk -- is an inevitable result of computer use. As photos, documents, spreadsheets and other digital information are created, saved, revised, and moved on a computer or storage network, portions are placed in open spots on one or more disks. Over time, through normal use, file information becomes increasingly disjointed, making it more and more difficult and time-consuming to reassemble -- or even find -- a given file.

Fragmentation is a disease that infects virtually all routine computer activity. When data is fragmented, simple tasks like searching for an email, performing security scans, saving a document, even booting up a workstation, can be a painstakingly slow process. What's more, computers with fragmented hard drives are more likely to hang or crash, files are more likely to be corrupted and therefore inaccessible, and backups can seemingly take an eternity.

Controlled lab tests have put numbers to this amorphous drop in performance. On a computer with a typical amount of file storage on a fragmented disk, for example, it took 68% longer to search email text matches, 90% longer to retrieve ten Web pages in a Microsoft Internet Explorer cache, and 123% longer to scan for spyware than on a defragmented disk.

So what has happened in the past few years to make disk fragging such a pervasive problem? The size and configuration of popular applications and operating systems, for one. Typical file size has gone up as well. Multimedia files such as video and music are far more common today than in years past; movies, songs and photos are not only huge and unwieldy, but their enormous size ensures that they are stored in hundreds of places on a disk, making recovery for playback or viewing purposes exceedingly slow.

Also contributing are people's desires to hold onto data. Like homeowners who sell their small home in order to move into one with a larger attic, people tend to save in proportion to their available space. With thousands of files stored on the average hard drive, clutter is inevitable.

In the enterprise environment, additional factors come into play. Government regulations of recent years including Sarbanes-Oxley, Gramm-Leach- Bliley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the Patriot Act, all have mandates requiring secure storage of critical information that can run to millions of files. In many cases, deleting such files is a federal offence.

As a rule, the greater the number of files, the greater a problem fragmentation becomes. And while files in an enterprise environment are typically stored in Storage Area Networks (SANs) or Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, it's a mistake to think that local desktop computers and workstations aren't impacted by disk fragmentation. Many temporary files are stored locally that affect the performance of Web browsers and email programs. Employees often use laptops as their portable office, making backup and synchronization of work files especially important.

With the need -- and expectation -- for optimal computer performance rising, the problems caused by hard disk fragmentation can no longer be considered "old hat." The Age of Information continues to grow with no end in sight -- making the evils of fragmentation nothing less than a mission- critical challenge.

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