Defrag: Make Sure Automatic Really Means Automatic

BURBANK, CA, Jul 22 (MARKET WIRE) --
As we all know, buying a car can be a trying experience. We also know
that car salespeople can be a bit sneaky at times, telling you something
is included when in actuality it isn't, or perhaps not the way you were
led to believe. What if you were to go through the several-hour trying
ordeal of buying a car, believing you were getting an automatic
transmission, only to get the car delivered and finding an extra pedal
there on the lefthand side? The pedal turns out to be a clutch, and the
car actually has a manual transmission. When you finally get the salesman
on the phone, he defends himself with, "Well, when you press that clutch
and shift, the transmission automatically changes gears." You'd kind of
look at the phone in disbelief and probably hang up on the guy.

Believe it or not, there is a similar situation today with defragmenters.
There are a number of defragmenters on the market touted as "automatic" --
including the one currently included in the Vista operating system. But
when you actually open up one of these defragmenters, you realize you have
to schedule it. In a similar way to the car, you might wonder why it was
advertised as "automatic," and if you were to inquire, a salesperson might
tell you, "Well, after you take the time to schedule it, it runs
automatically." That's as silly as a response as that of the car salesman;
you have to figure out when you can run this defragmenter so it won't
impact performance while it's running (increasingly difficult in this time
of 24x7 operation), and you have to frequently analyze systems to see if
the defragmenter is running often enough and if it's doing its job.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "automatic" as "having the
capability of starting, operating, moving, etc., independently." Since
these defragmenters advertised as "automatic" obviously don't do that,
let's take a look at what automatic defragmentation would actually consist
of. It takes minutes to set up, and once started, it handles
defragmentation invisibly and consistently from that point forward. Since
it uses otherwise idle resources, it has no negative performance impact
while defragmenting and hence requires no scheduling. In other words, it
is really and truly automatic; you never have to worry about
defragmentation again.

In addition to the valuable IT time it takes to schedule these
"solutions," scheduled defragmentation has other problems. In between the
scheduled runs when defragmentation is not occurring, today's frantic
fragmentation continues to occur and to impact performance. And in some
cases -- as with very large drives -- fragmentation may not be occurring
at all, even during the scheduled runs.

The moral: when obtaining a defragmenter, make sure that "automatic"
really means what it says. If it has to be scheduled, it isn't automatic.

Contact:
Bruce Boyers Marketing Services
Email: info@boyersmarketing.com

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