ERIC
SPELLMANN
The Easy-Bake Hard Drive
- ERIC
SPELLMANN takes a look at keeping your PC's hard drive in good
shape
Want
to bake a cake? You’ll need cake mix (that’s as
close to “made from scratch” as I will ever get), eggs,
milk, oil, water, a mixing bowl, electric mixer, cake pan, and
a measuring cup.
If someone has been nice enough to put all of those items on the kitchen counter
(as in every TV cooking show), you can make your cake rather quickly. However,
if the necessary ingredients and tools are scattered about your kitchen; or
worse yet, still at the supermarket, your preparation time will grow exponentially.
Your computer’s hard drive is a lot like that kitchen. It contains
thousands of drawers (called sectors) for storing information. When you
tell your computer to save a file, it looks for an available sector. Since
most computer files are larger than any single sector, your computer breaks
(fragments) them into sector-sized pieces for storage. When you open a
file (bake a cake), your system pulls all the appropriate fragments from their
sectors and reassembles them.
Stick with me. Here’s where it gets interesting. If all of
the sectors are contiguous (next to each other), your hard drive can retrieve
and assemble the pieces very quickly. If, however, the needed pieces of
a file are scattered in sectors all over the hard drive, your system will take
MUCH longer to reassemble the file.
When saving a file, your system attempts to store all of the file fragments
in contiguous sectors. However, if it can’t find enough contiguous sectors,
it will save the file wherever it can find space. And that, my friends,
is what we call a fragmented file. Over time, as the number of fragmented
files grows, your hard disk performance deteriorates. Your system seems
to get slower and slower for no apparent reason.
A long time ago, Microsoft wrote a program called “defrag” to solve
this problem. When run, this program looks at your entire hard drive and
begins to put file pieces into contiguous sectors. Defrag, now called “Disk
Defragmenter” ships with every copy of Windows, and works well.
However, it has two major drawbacks: it cannot be easily scheduled (for
automatic operation); and it draws the line at open files. In other words,
if you have a program running, or a document open, the defragmenter program
cannot work with those sectors. If the Windows Disk Defragmenter runs into
too many open files or running programs, it will eventually give up and abort.
To use Disk Defragmenter, make sure you close all running programs and documents. Then, click
your START button, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter.
Diskeeper
While the Microsoft defragmenter is fine for most basic systems, it cannot
squeeze every ounce of efficiency out of your system or network server. For
those heavy-duty systems, I rely on Diskeeper by
Executive Software.
This software comes in two basic flavours: the Desktop/Workstation version
and the Server version. Both can be downloaded for a 30-day free trial
at their website. Diskeeper surpasses the capabilities of Windows’ Disk
Defragmenter in numerous areas:
In a server environment, Diskeeper can be set to automatically defragment all
hard drives during low-use times. This feature insures hard disk efficiency
and reduces the need for a full-blown defragmentation session.
With boot-level defragmenting abilities, Diskeeper can work with operating
system files normally unavailable to Microsoft’s program.
The “engine” in Diskeeper runs 300-500% faster than the Disk Defragmenter,
lowering your downtime.
In most cases, running a great program like Diskeeper can extend the life of
your PC (and speed it up) significantly. And, by downloading Executive
Software’s free 30-day trial version, you can test it on your system
before opening up your wallet; kind of like “having your cake and eating
it, too ...”
I’ll see you in cyberspace!
http://www.EricSpellmann.com
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