If there is a common primary goal amongst all system administrators, it is probably "to keep the system up and running." Such a goal has many ramifications, including keeping hardware and software debugged, making sure all upgrades and updates are in place and keeping users functioning and happy. Because technology is such an integral part of companies today, a stable system greatly contributes to a secure, prospering enterprise. It is therefore of benefit to IT personnel everywhere to fully address blocks to that stability.

Such issues -- things that normally make system administrators flinch at their very mention -- include slowing of access, disk errors, network performance problems, lengthened or aborted backups, and similar factors. These issues all have one common cause, however.

That cause would be file fragmentation which is the crippling malady that affects performance and reliability on all systems. Because hard drives have to work so much harder to access fragmented files, speed and access are greatly reduced and hardware life is shortened by as much as 50 percent. Scheduled defrag is no longer adequate in today's frantic environments. In between scheduled runs, fragmentation builds up to compound and impact overall system stability.

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