Fragmenting and Data Performance

Filed in archive SAN on February 27, 2007

Does file fragmentation affect the quality of your data storage? Most would answer no to that question. However, a new white paper released by Diskeeper Corporation begs to differ. The company contends that data storage is indeed affected by the fragmentation of the storage hardware because the fragmentation interrupts the "logical" allocation of files, and can sometimes affect their physical distribution.

Here's why:

As you can see in the graphic, the NTFS driver deals with the logical location of data, such as what operating system is involved and how it is affected by the defragmentation. The writing of the data is passed on to the fault tolerant driver, which takes care of placment of the file and generates parity information. It then passes the data to be stored to the disk device driver.

Because folks want access to data much faster, they create stripe sets, which work well in a number of cases, but can make it tough to search for sequentially located data, which may have been parsed out into different fragments depending on how the storage media allocated the job.

Diskeeper believes it has the solution in hand. The company claims its software can read the data in the same way it's being stored, and can defragment in a more logical manner, allowing data to be saved and retrieved with less headache.