What is disk fragmentation and why does it happen? As files are stored, moved, deleted, updated and so on, over time they can be potentially stored on different areas of the disk rather than in a single block. This is called disk fragmentation. There could be thousands of parts of files scattered all over the disks on your home server. What this means is that it takes longer to read and write those files than it would do if they were all in the same place. That annoying delay waiting for that Word document to open? Could be disk fragmentation.

This is where disk defragmentation software comes into play. The software examines the disk and all of your files, figures out where the parts of the files pysically on your drives are and attempts to move them together to make things run faster and smoother. This is a good thing – just imagine having hundreds of gigabytes of files scattered all over the disk.

One extremely important thing to remember if you want to run disk defragmentation software on your Windows Home Server, that as with Anti-Virus software, you need to ensure that you use a product that specifically supports WHS and not just any old defrag program. At the time of writing, the only two products on the market that support WHS are Diskeeper 2008 and PerfectDisk. Why is this? Windows Home Server utilises a number of unique new file system technologies which non-WHS specific software does not work with - using non WHS specific defrag and anti-virus software can lead to data loss.

For those of you who might be familiar with Diskeeper, there are a number of key features for WHS users:

• WHS Console integration which lets you control everything and view status updates directly from within the WHS Console.
• Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) compatibility, which ensures that there are not problems with any shadow copies on your WHS.
• Real-time defragmentation ensures that your system is continually defragmented to ensure that you don’t have to run long defrags.
• Background processing which ensure that there is no performance issues using a technology Diskeeper calls InvisiTasking.

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