Ashampoo has lunched its updated defragmentation tool, Ashampoo Magical Defrag 2.08, which automatically runs in the background when the PC is left idle, unlike the Windows based defragmentation tool which needs to be manually run. While most consumers install virus checkers and anti-spyware software to keep their PC clean of unwanted and potentially dangerous software, many never give a thought to how fragmented their PC hard disks get, which should be a concern for those who regularly write DVDs where write speed is their main concern. This new version is Vista compatible, uses a defragmentation algorithm to improve its performance and efficiency and includes a real-time graphic analysis which can be optionally turned on.
As manufacturers continue to push up the speed of DVD writers, with 20x DVD write speed becoming more common, one thing that consumers often don't realise is that their DVD write performance can also be affected by how much disk fragmentation is present on the disk holding the source files for the disc. If the source files are heavily fragmented, this could easily reduce the write speed, since the recording software ends up spending more time trying to read the source files. For example, if a source file is broken up into 800 fragments, which can easily happen on a heavily fragmented volume, this alone will add 10 seconds to the read back of this file, since the HDD would need to seek each fragment.
Fragmentation occurs as a result of a combination of files being removed and added. For example, if a software package made up of a lot of small files is removed, this creates a lot of small empty spaces where these files were originally located. Now, if a large file is copied to the volume and there is not a large enough continuous block of free space to store the file, windows will break the file up into fragments and store it within the free space sections. This happens transparent to the user, since the file still looks intact; however when it is read back, each fragment making up the file must be seeked in sequence. What the disk defragmentation tool does (in this case Ashampoo Magical Defrag 2) is reorganise the content such that each file is stored as one continuous block of data.
