Their a couple of advantages to defragging your HDD.
Improved performance especially if you are using over 50% of the drive space.
Increased life of the HDD because when the HDD is not defgramented the movement of the the read/write assembly which is a mechanical part on a HDD is reduced and therefore the life the HDD is increased
Improves backup speed
Improves security
As far as defgragging the Registry when using Windows 7 and a HDD this is a hotly debated subject on which those for and against are generally intractable in their opinions.
On a more serious note Microsoft did consider a more ‘up to date’ version of the INI
XML was mentioned but there are security issues.
The had to buy SysInternals to get MarkR 'cos they no longer ‘knew’ how things worked :o
Reason number 2 is only true if you do NOT do things like auto-defrags and/or scheduled defrags. If you do those things, you can significantly decrease the life span of the HDD.
Because you’re putting needless wear and tear on the drive which after all, is a mechanical device and can break down. Defragging once a week is probably more than sufficient for today’s faster drives.
