What you might not be aware of, however, is the toll that fragmentation can take on your computer hardware, specifically your hard drive.

File fragmentation is an unfortunate side effect of a file system utilizing a hard drive to its best. Saving files in fragments means that nearly all of the space on a hard drive can be used — files saved all in one piece would leave considerable wasted space. But the solution to better hard drive use became something that drastically abused it.

The reason is that in order to access a fragmented file, the computer needs to perform seek operations for each file fragment. If a file is fragmented in tens, hundreds or thousands of fragments (this is very common), the "thrashing" of the hard drive is quite dramatic and can easily reduce the lifespan of a hard drive.

Most people won’t wait until a drive actually quits functioning. As the drives begin to slow users will replace the drive. So this premature ending to a drive’s life comes even sooner.

For an individual user, such a toll on the hard drive can be expensive, not taking into account priceless lost files (such as family photos). For a company with multiple computers or a whole network, it can mean serious money in lost production, data, and hardware replacement costs.

In either case, an ounce of prevention — the relatively minor cost of a defrag solution — is worth a pound of cure. Which, in this case, means new hard drives.

Not only should defragmentation be put into place, but attention should also be paid to the defragmentation technology employed.

Recently file sizes and disk capacities have grown dramatically, and increasing the rate of fragmentation build-up and the toll is still being taken on your drive or drives despite a defragmenter being used.

Today’s computing environment mandates a fully automatic defragmentation solution, one that will defragment any time idle system resources are available. That means performance is always maintained — and your hard drive will actually perform for its expected life.