Today's hard drives are 10 times faster than the drives of old — is defragging really still worth the bother?

Reader David H. Copp wonders whether the time has come to challenge the conventional wisdom about defragging.

"You have a good piece about defragging in your April 22 column. But I think you are echoing a myth.

"Back in the days of my first hard drive, a 20Mb Seagate ST-225, defragging was important. But so far as I know, there are no measurements that show that defragging a modern drive has more than one or two percent impact on performance. Please correct me if I am wrong!"

You're right that defragging isn't as important as it once was. But there's more to defragging than simply improving hard drive performance.

In fact, I defragg my drives nearly every day. The whys of it all make up the top item in my Windowssecrets.com column this week.

The rest of my section of the newsletter:

• Selecting a mouse and keyboard for use with Win7
• Do small LANs pose extra security concerns?
• External USB drive bluescreens Windows

The full issue's contents:

The following links includes all articles this week: http://WindowsSecrets.com/ Free content posted on May 13, 2010: TOP STORY By Robert Vamosi New findings update WS Security Baseline Suites that quietly work in the background Intermediate suites provide more customization Advanced security — build it yourself LOUNGE LIFE By Tracey Capen How many firewalls running together is too many? WACKY WEB WEEK By Stephanie Small Fun ways to take revenge on would-be thieves   You get all of the following in the paid content: LANGALIST PLUS By Fred Langa Hard-drive defragmentation is still worthwhile What good does defragging do nowadays? Selecting a mouse and keyboard for use with Win7 Do small LANs pose extra security concerns? External USB drive bluescreens Windows BEST SOFTWARE By Ian "Gizmo" Richards Reassessing and retuning Google's Chrome Google makes its browser fresh, fast, and safe Building a streamlined but effective interface Chrome plays catch up on browser extensions Convenient searching versus privacy invasion PATCH WATCH By Susan Bradley A patch for Microsoft's e-mail clients Mail clients need protection from hot spots Visual Basic update may need more updates Adobe Shockwave Player patch fixes many flaws .NET patch gets released a second time Apple iPad DHCP fix for sticky IP addresses The future release of .NET 4 will be optional A portion of your support helps children in developing countries Each month, we send a full year of sponsorship to a different child. Your contributions in May are helping us to sponsor Peter, a 7-year-old boy from Zambia. Children International channels development aid from donors to Peter and his community. We also sponsor kids through Save the Children and Plan USA. More info

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