PC World is just one of numerous magazine's I read and monitor for various industry news, reviews and opinions. Heck, earlier this week I wrote a post about an article in PC World. But since I work for a software vendor that helps people and businesses achieve performance and storage management improvements (primarily through defragmenting computer), the January 2010 edition's
PC Performance Myths article caught my eye immediately.
So as sure as not to misquote, here is PC World's stated "myth" (I have the print edition, the online version was not online as of the writing of this post):
Defragging your hard drive: Back when drives were small and OSs were simpler, doing this was necessary. But Windows XP, Vista and 7 all have automated disk optimization, and it's rare for a drive to become so fragmented that it hampers performance. While defragmenting isn't harmful, it's usually a waste of time.
Ok, by mentioning that there are built-in XP, Vista and Windows 7 defrag options, presumably at least part of PC World's real message was that you don't need to buy one or use anything other than what the OS comes with. Although this article didn't say that, that is what this portion of the article meant (you're welcome, PC World editors).
Now for the rest -- "back when drives were small and OSs were simpler, doing this was necessary," but not now and not since the advent of Windows XP. Really. So a good old- school 80GB drive running Windows 95 might have needed it, for all that Word and Office stuff people were doing. But now, take all that, and add terabyte drives, volumes of pictures and videos, editing and deleting, and even more work and more play being done at home and at work, now fragmentation is not a problem? Humorous at best - detrimental at worst. So more people and more businesses than ever before are buying defraggers, and there are more defrag offerings than ever before, all because Microsoft, Diskeeper, PerfectDisk and a bunch of freeware apps are all crazy? Defrag PC? PC World thinks you're an idiot...
"It's rare for a drive to become so fragmented that it hampers performance." Try doing something real (for fun or work) on your computer today, with larger files and larger drives, without a defragmenter, and see what happens. Anyone saying that performance won't be impacted does not have an even marginal understanding of the NTFS file system. Hello, ivory tower....
"...it's usually a waste of time." I guess I better get on the phone and call the CIOs and IT directors of Global 1000 companies and others and tell them all that research and testing they did to determine specific performance and resource usage improvements was invalid, and despite what came out of the labs, it ain't true. Sorry World of Warcraft users - you only think you're playing your game faster. Sorry, videographers, the time you thought you were saving was really a dream. Productivity increases and faster access to databases? It's just your imagination...
Are you using a disk defragmenter program, built-in or otherwise? PC World thinks you're crazy. I'm just one of many that knows you're not, and you're smarter than those guys.
This is the type of writing that gives the mainstream media a bad name...
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