Raxco’s PerfectDisk aims to meet enterprise users’ defragmentation needs.
Everyone knows what defragging does. It takes fragmented files and puts them all back together again. This makes accessing those files quicker and the computer gets a new lease of life. That’s one view of defragging. A company called Raxco has a slightly different take on the problem, one that sheds a whole new light on the issue of fragmentation.
Raxco, with its PerfectDisk range of products, doesn’t just consider fragmented files; it also looks at fragmented disk space and defrags this as well. Fragmented free space causes fragmentation of files, and if there is not a large enough piece of contiguous free space available in which to store a file, then the OS will have to fragment the file on saving.
This means that even after a ‘normal’ defragmentation, with all the files nicely put back together, the next file saved will be fragmented and the disk is already starting to underperform. Sounds obvious. Pity not all defraggers take account of this. PerfectDisk not only defrags files, as any good defragger will, it also defragments the free space in a single pass. This means the disk is returned to a state close to what it was in its virgin state.
This way of viewing defragmentation has many advantages; not least of these is the time taken to carry out the defragmentation. A first time defragmentation using PerfectDisk may take longer than if using another tool (it may not take as long either, but the possibility of increased time has to be recognized). However, because of the way it handles the defragmentation of free space, subsequent defragmentations will be quicker.
For a single disk on a user’s desktop this may not be seen as a big saving, but Raxco provides defragmentation solutions for enterprise-class users, and once we start to examine this space (if you’ll forgive the intentional pun), the savings in time and money really start to mount up.
Source: OpinionWire by Butler Group (www.butlergroup.com)
