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Diskeeper Corporation has included automated defragmentation functionality into the next iteration of its flagship application, Diskeeper 2007.
The technology, dubbed InvisiTasking, allows system maintenance to run invisibly in the background, and draws on unused system resources in order to perform defragmentation without affecting network performance.
The launch of Diskeeper 2007 represents a new step forward for defragmentation, said Diskeeper product manager Michael Materie, because it allows users to “install it and forget it,” rather than schedule regular defrag sessions.
When Diskeeper first appeared about a decade ago, the product was unique because it allowed users to create a schedule for defragmentation rather than do the work manually, freeing them from waiting around the office after hours or going in on weekends just to defrag a system.
But as the amount of data and applications on systems has grown, Diskeeper realized it needed to have a more advanced option than simple scheduling ability.
“Weve been improving the product over time to have it run during the day, since theres so much more data now that people need to be able to do defragmentation even while users are on the system,” said Materie.
Even with scheduling trumping manual processes, though, users still had management issues, such as having to check reports on the effect of the defragmentation, Materie added.
“There were a lot of headaches with scheduling that we wanted to fix.”
InvisiTasking, considered the foundation of the new Diskeeper version, is invisible to system users but still keeps volumes highly defragmented for faster system performance.
“The system understands what to defragment, the user doesnt have to do anything but install it,” Materie said.
“And it wont run unless the resources are there and performance wont be affected.”
Another feature unique to Diskeeper, according to Materie, is I-FAAST 2.0 (Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology), which increases file access by up to 80 percent.
The technology allows a computer to access a set of files based on a set of criteria, such as how often the files are regularly used.
“The purpose of automated defragmentation is to get a system running as fast as it was when it was new, or even better than that,” Materie said. “File sequencing is just the icing on the cake.”