I have a production MS SQL Server 2005 DB that I have recently become an "unintentional DB Admin" for... while poking around the settings for the DB I found that it has the default AutoGrow settings of 1MB. I've read (and generally believe) that this is not an appropriate setting - the DB is 14GB large. I'm willing (and likely) to change it, but my question is... If no one noticed it in all of the years we've been using it (especially users), why should I change it now? To put it another way, I guess I understand on a basic level why 1MB is too small - it's probably autogrowing often, perhaps daily or several times a day - but I'm thinking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
What specific justifications are there to increase the autogrow? Does it lock users out while autogrowing? Does it re-index? Does the DB do anything besides just add more disk space to the DB?