I just spent seven hours defragging a 2-TB hard drive, and it occurred to me that this was a silly thing to do.

This drive is 95% filled with nothing but audio files. It is a backup to an identical drive, and is never read, only written to when new files are added. The same can be said for its source-drive twin, except that the source-drive does get read on occasion when I copy files from it into my iPod.

Is there any conceivable benefit that would outweigh the wear and tear of seven hours of head thrashing, other than the feeling of satisfaction of seeing my drive map look like the attached?

With a 5400 RPM system (C:>) drive, is there enough performance gain to justify the wear and tear of defragging? The majority of my work involves writing to single fairly large files, such as a spreadsheet. Are we talking about real speed enhancement here, or is it just an occasional microsecond?

tanstaafl.