Storage Area Networks (SANs) relies on hard drives, and unfortunately file fragmentation can be a problem. According to this Earth Times report, one major component of SAN technology, RAID, is also affected by fragmentation. As a file is saved, a number of attributes must be checked for that file, costing valuable system time.
“SAN technology is certainly advanced. But despite all of its enhancements, if one crucial and basic problem is not addressed, it will critically impact the SAN performance on which the enterprise is counting. This is not through any fault in SAN processes; it is due to the fact that files are saved and read to drives by the Windows file system, below the level of SAN’s many enhancements.
“A SAN still relies on hard drives, and unfortunately file fragmentation is a fact of life on hard drives. File fragmentation causes files to exist in thousands or even tens of thousands of fragments, causing highly excessive additional I/Os in accessing those files. Performance is dramatically slowed and hardware life is considerably shortened.”
