I received a comment on my post about Diskeeper 2008 from Diskeeper Corp VP of public affairs, and I am flattered he reads my stuff. So I am going to repost it, and I am also going to download and give the Diskeeper WHS add-in a real try. Thanks Derek.
. This is Derek with Diskeeper Corporation. Allow me to shed some light on this:
Actually, server systems rather see more benefit from defragmenting than say workstations, as they receive such heavy usage—thereby causing the performance to degrade more rapidly.
We have a huge following in the SBS space. And even in the enterprise space, 749 of the Fortune 1000 list are our customers (the backbone of these sales being server systems). They tend to see more server capacity and uptime, less crashes, less Help Desk calls and faster access or back up times. Also, their anti-virus scans are typically cut in half due to such heavy former levels of fragmentation which had to be scanned.
On the Home Server platform—we have families with multiple PCs linked to a server who are constantly saving and deleting their favorite music, photos, movies, video and Office files. This causes increasing levels of fragmentation across the drive, easily in the thousands. And the more fragmented those files are in, the longer it takes to read them. It also results in painfully long anti-virus scans. So WHS users need to get rid of fragmentation to get the most performance and reliability out of their machines.
I understand your concern for strain on the hard drives. But if we look a little deeper, we see that it is actually file fragmentation itself that causes undue strain on hard drives—since the machine is then forced to work overtime to access the thousands of files scattered all across the disk.
Whereas, if we defragment a drive and thereby place a large file into one location, the drive has but one I/O cycle to perform. This takes the strain on the hard drive down to near zero. In other words, the benefit of defragmenting the hard drive far outweighs the performance impact of ignoring the problem altogether.
But don’t just take my word on it. Have you played with Diskeeper 2008 Home Server edition yet? I recommend downloading a tiral ware copy at
www.diskeeper.com.
It’s a gorgeous utility which snaps right into the WHS console. Microsoft is using it. Give it a spin and let me know your thoughts.
Best,
Derek De Vette
VP Public Affairs
Diskeeper Corporation
Tel: 818 771 1600 ext. 1717
