Unit 8 Analysis 1: System Performance A file system on your computer may be fragmented, and cause the whoel system to take te bottleneck effect into play. Usually disk fragmentation is one of the most overlooked but common problems of a slow system, and even with a brand new, fast system, a fragmented disk drive can make it extremely slow. It will become most noticeable when loading large files like movies, not even moving them, just streaming from you rhard drive can cause your system to have performance issues. Some database files may be large in file size as well and can be seen as aproblem with a fragmented disk. Over time with using the large files you will see a performance degradation cause by disk fragmentation. When a hard drive is formatted into sectors, each e=sector is assigned 512 bytes of data, which then whichever file system you are running will depend on how these sectors are grouped into clusters. A cluster is the smallest unit of space to hold a single file, and on NTFS disks, the cluster size depends on the overall size of the hard drive. When the system has a brand new hard drive and you save a file onto it, the adjacent clusters are free of space and those spaces are filled in order respectively, which makes it easier on the hard drive to access these clusters to retrieve the file, and the mechanical components work more efficiently and improve the life of the overall hard drive. Over time with deleting and saving different files, th files that are saved to the drive ge allocated to save in different physical locations which require the drive to jump from end to end to receive these file, which starts to slow down the whole system. If the system doesn’t have enough memory in the CPU, it stores it as virtual memory in the RAM, the CPU can reserve space on the hard drive to extend its RAM. The RAM doesn’t necessarily speed up the system