Sometimes it's the constant maintenance that you're throwing good money at. Often, that maintenance comes as a result of file fragmentation. As Diskeeper Corporation puts it, without file fragmentation, large amounts of disk space would remain unutilized. Disk storage capacity is greatly expanded by allowing files to be split into smaller pieces that can be randomly placed on whatever clusters are available. If the file fragments fall into largely contiguous clusters, there is minimal performance impact. But if fragments are placed in non-contiguous blocks, it results in a significant degradation in system performance and accessibility. Why? The disk's read/write head must jump from track to track to find all the pieces of the file and reassemble them into a single file. This results in disk latency and overall system slowdowns which can also lead to common system reliability issues that demand help desk and troubleshooting resources to resolve. Although many companies acknowledge that file fragmentation is a fact of life on most modern distributed systems, few are aware of just how much it is costing the bottom line in terms of lost performance and downtime.

Diskeeper and IDC have released a white paper that explains how defragmentation and the subsequent maintenance affects your ROI. Download it here.