The Right Defrag Solution--More Cost Effective Than a Free Solution

A utility or function that is "free" should always be examined carefully. For example, an aspiring musician may go shopping for a keyboard and find one for a decent price that has a built-in "free" drum machine. On the surface, it sounds like a great deal; they can have rhythm accompaniment as they play and it's like having your own little band. But when they get the keyboard home and actually put this "free" drum machine to work, they find that it's very limited in the sounds it will produce and in fact makes their creations sound a bit cheesy. In order to make it sound halfway good, the drum sounds will have to be run through a separate amplifier. But then they find that they can't even run the drum machine out from the keyboard separately. After countless wasted hours and endless tweaking, the musician realizes that it would have taken far less money and time—and would have produced a better result—if he or she had just invested in a professional drum machine in the first place.

Moving over into the world of computers, one finds a similar scenario: that of a free defragmenter. Again on the surface it sounds ideal. There is no up-front cost, and it will take care of that performance-crippling fragmentation problem so IT can take their attention off of it and move onto other pressing matters.

But when the time comes to actually get the defragmentation work done, a realization will dawn upon the system administrator about how “free” this defrag solution isn’t. First it has to be scheduled, many times on systems that must remain up and running 24X7. Many IT hours can be wasted in trying to fit in such schedules. Users cannot be on the system when the free defrag is running, causing more lost time and worse, income. And in between these scheduled runs, fragmentation continues to build and impact performance and reliability, which lowers the cost-effectiveness of the entire enterprise.

Then even more problems arise. IT personnel can never tell if a disk is fully defragged because there is no progress chart in the UI. Only one instance of the defragger can be run at a time. Only local drives can be defragmented.

The only true defrag solution today is one that does not require scheduling and addresses fragmentation consistently in the background. Because only idle system resources are used, there is never a negative impact on users. Such a solution means that IT can remove their attention from fragmentation at the moment this solution is installed—performance and reliability are constantly maximized. When comparing such a solution to the free defragmenter, the actual and staggering costs of the "free" utility become readily apparent.