Deep cognition: What threats does disk fragmentation pose to security belts?

File System fragmentation is not a strange problem for most computer users. But in fact, they do not understand the real dangers of it. They do not know that file fragments can cause system performance degradation and speed reduction. For family users, the best performance in the game is an example. After all, this is usually the project with the highest performance requirements.

Users who are aware of the dangers of File System fragments often know the existence of the fragment program and sometimes even use it. However, most users are far from enough in this regard. Especially for security, this should be a very important issue.

The list of current security problems provided below is very short, but considering fragmentation (usually) is relatively simple, it is necessary to avoid risks at a time, the importance of doing so is further displayed.

Fragment includes three key security projects:

1. Disaster Recovery: If a file error occurs in the system, you need to recover the data. During this time, many recovery tools can use the File Allocation Table to perform this operation. However, if the file has been damaged, it will increase the difficulty of recovery and the time consumed will also increase. This time assumes that there are many file fragments, which will further reduce the recovery success rate, the possibility of rebuilding files using the recovery tool is also quickly reduced. Therefore, you should have a well-preserved latest backup. But if files containing important data are stored and damaged between two backups, how can this problem be solved? This is a very practical problem for data security.

2. Input/output activities: The more scattered the data on the drive, the more time and probability it will take to read and store the data, the more heat it will generate, and the faster the performance will decline, because of component wear, the overall use time will be reduced more quickly. Due to design requirements, the number of write operations on general SSDS is limited, which means that scattered data will greatly reduce their overall use time, although data sorting will also produce such results, it is relatively light. From the perspective of data security, the worst long-term result is system crash.

3. Performance: You may think that performance reduction is only a small problem, but the actual situation is not like this. It also seriously affects the speed, efficiency, and effectiveness of security software, including application layer firewalls and virus scanning tools. Virus scanning is the most affected part. Because the distribution of scan tools and virus-defining libraries is fragmented, it is inconvenient for scanning the entire file system regularly to provide complete protection. The backup operation is also affected.

Of course, it is not very difficult to choose a better solution, as long as you use a file system that does not produce a lot of fragments. In fact, most of the file systems provided by modern operating systems have a good effect on File Fragment processing. For example, file systems such as UFS, ext3, and ZFS solve this problem perfectly. But the two most common file systems NTFS and FAT32 (still applied to many external storage devices) have not effectively solved this problem.

As the primary user of NTFS and FAT32 file systems, Microsoft Windows operating systems include a fragment utility installed by default. But as a third-party tool, defragmenters can do better. If the computer that uses the Microsoft Windows operating system is located inside a large network and runs a large number of input/output operations, considering the price, function, reliability, efficiency, and actual effect, it is a good choice. However, please note that even the best fragment tool cannot change the fact that the Microsoft Windows operating system will make the system run slower and slower.

Modern non-Microsoft operating systems use file systems that do not require fragment: the FreeBSD operating system uses the UFS file system, most of the Linux operating systems use the ext3 file system, and the OpenSolaris operating system uses the ZFS file system. Other types of file systems include reiserfs, XFS, and JFS. For example, if the storage device is already full of data (typically, more than 98% of the storage space is occupied), then the file system will have a major problem. In this rare case. A fully functional file system will quickly reconstruct the file distribution system through tools such as dumping and recovery.

Whether this is the case or not, you should make your file distribution system perform fragment regularly, which not only improves performance, but also ensures data security. The best solution is, of course, a file system that does not easily generate file fragments. However, if this is not possible, frequent fragment can improve the security of data protection and improve the defense against malicious hackers and malware.

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