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The Defrag Challenge of Terabyte Drives

Multi-Terabyte drives are a serious blessing to enterprises everywhere. Where it previously took 5, 10 or more drives to store a certain amount of data, 1 will now suffice. They arrived none-too-soon -- the volume of data being stored and analyzed by today's companies is staggering, as are the multi-gigabyte file sizes now required by multi-media applications. The fewer the drives needed for storage, the less complex the storage scenario. And fewer than ever are now needed: 10- and 20-terabyte drives are now on the market, and higher-capacity hard disks are now on the way.

These drives present a particular challenge when it comes to defrag, however. It's interesting to think that when they first appeared, rumors circulated that these hard disks didn't require defragmentation -- for nothing could be further from the truth. Because the operating system fragments files automatically, fragmentation has nothing whatsoever to do with the size or speed of the disk. Small or large, the files written to a disk will be fragmented.

But with multi-terabyte drives, the fragmentation problem has grown in proportion to the file sizes and amount of storage space. With many times more files at much larger sizes, the fragmentation problem has increased many times over. The significant gains achieved by the utilization of such drives can be defeated by their intense rate of fragmentation. Performance is slowed radically, and the life of the drive is shortened by as much as 50 percent.

A tool must be adequate to the job at hand, and this adage holds true for such mammoth rates and amounts of fragmentation; a defrag solution must be able to address it. The "one size fits all" approach might have worked for lesser drives, but those same defragmenters applied to multi-terabyte drives will grind endlessly for days, making little or no impact on the problem. The performance and reliability problems associated with fragmentation will continue to persist.

The lesson to be learned: as your company adopts multi-terabyte drives and brings them online, make sure your defrag solution will handle them adequately. Defragmenters are now available with specially designed engines for such drives, that can defrag them in hours instead of simply working for days with no end in sight.

The considerable performance increases from defragmentation on large drives have been documented repeatedly, and anyone can simply test for themselves with before and after tests with defragmentation trialware. It is highly recommended that you do.