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Speed up defragmentation with Acronis Disk Director Suite

Defragmenting is a vital part of maintaining your disk drive. You can use partitions created with Acronis Disk Director Suite to make defragmenting faster and easier.

Although we refer to "files" and "folders" the basic unit of hard disk storage is the "block" a chunk of disk space about 4Kb in size. The operating system divides files into blocks and stores them in the available space on the hard disk. As files are erased, their component blocks are released back into the available storage pool. This adding and releasing of blocks creates fragmentation, files' component blocks scattered all over the disk instead of being next to each other or contiguous. Performance suffers as the disk becomes fragmented. Eventually, if the fragmentation becomes too severe, you can't install new software because there isn't enough contiguous space.

Using the built-in Windows defragmenter, or a third-party defragmenter, rearranges the blocks on the hard disk to put all the blocks containing each file together and to consolidate the unused space into large chunks.

Defragmenting a hard disk takes time, up to an hour or more on a typical drive. While you can continue to work on a Windows machine while the drive is defragmenting, the operation takes a good deal of processing power and significantly slows other operations. Because of the possibility of corrupting or losing data, defragmentation gets a very high priority and that robs resources from the jobs you want to do. Sometimes the defragmenter has to be run several times in succession to squeeze everything as tightly as possible.

But you don't have to defragment the entire disk at once. Defragmenting utilities let you choose which partitions you want to defragment. Think of it as cleaning out your filing cabinet, if you have a three-drawer cabinet, you can straighten out the top drawer while the other drawers remain unchanged. Similarly, if create separate partitions on your disk for the operating system, programs and data files, you can run the defragmentation software on one partition without disturbing the others. This not only speeds up the defragmentation operation, it makes your computer more efficient in general since smaller partitions mean faster access.

For effective defragmentation with Windows' built-in defragmentation utility, you shouldn't let a partition get more than 80 percent full. With Acronis Disk Director Suite, you can easily and quickly resize partitions to add space to the partitions that are becoming too full. Or you can use the software to split partitions into two or more new partitions.

Here's a quick tip to remember: If you also use Acronis True Image to create an image of your hard disk, run it after you run the defragmenting software. Because you will change so many sectors on the partition, we advise that you make a full backup image, not an incremental image. Incremental backups look for changed sectors, so since you change so many during a defrag operation, it makes sense to make a full, new image immediately to preserve the data and the disk optimization efforts.