Diskeeper Corporation White Paper Sample

SANs, NAS devices, corporate servers, and even high end workstations and multimedia-centric desktops characteristically implement multiple physical disk drives in some form of fault tolerant disk striping (RAID). Because the purpose of fault tolerant disk striping is to offer redundancy, as well as improved disk performance by splitting the I/O load, it is a common misconception that fragmentation does not have a negative impact. It’s also important to note that the interface; EIDE, SCSI, SATA, i-SCSI, Fibre Channel, etc… does not alter the relevance of defragmentation.

As this data will show, these devices do suffer from fragmentation. This is attributed to the impact of fragmentation on “logical” allocation of files and to varying degree, their “physical” distribution.