Mumbai: The leading reason for workstation replacement is decreased speed, that too within just a few years of deployment. Most companies are unable to determine the cause of the performance degradation associated with older computers, and continue to unnecessarily replace them with new computers.

However, instead of replacing such workstations, all one needs to do is defrag (or defragment, as the terminology goes).

Usually, corporate security policies limit themselves to keeping viruses and other threats at bay, assuming workstations to be able to maintain an ideal and consistent performance level. Eventually, the fragmentation illness plagues the hard drive, wreaking havoc on files and performance, and increasing access times.

Fragmentation is the dismantling of files into numerous pieces, which is then scattered across hard drives during the read-write process. This causes increasingly poor file performance as it forces a workstation to check countless locations on the hard drive to re-assemble pieces of the file that the user is trying to access. Over time, these fragments slow down drive performance, given that files and written to and erased from the drive all the time.

The accumulation of file fragments on a hard drive is surprisingly quick, and moreover, its a proven fact that fragmentation occurs on all workstations, regardless of usage. Experiments by the Diskeeper Corporation, makers of defragmentation software, is a simple experiment using Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word over a two week timespan found that without defragmentation software, over 4,500 file fragments were generated in a two-week period.

Enforcing effective security policies at corporate workstations is most definitely a good practice in protection, but automated defragmentation is necessary to boost system performance and consequently, give a leg up to employee productivity.