For those IT professionals unsure about the impact of defragmentation on backup performance, the news is good. Diskeeper has released a study that shows the time required to back up data from a typical hard drive Volume to these backup devices can be decreased and the backup data transfer rate increased by defragmenting the volume prior to backup. Also, directory consolidation has a direct additional benefit in both of these areas. Backup times were improved at a rate of 69 percent, according to the Diskeeper study. Likewise, backup data transfer rates also experienced a 69 percent increase over fragmented environments.

Read Joe Kinsella's report here.