Bad Advice From Reputable Source?
Fred, I really need your assistance here.
In the well-known Magazine PCFormat, the technical guru Luis Villazon answers (nearly always sarcastically) readers queries.
He has in the past said partitioning is unnecessary as folders are the only things needed to organise Windows and that backups should be done on external hard drives backing up everything. A reader took him to task and he comes back with more radical statements, including saying that defrag is a waste of time.
I would really like your opinion, as what he says is so radical and against all I have ever learned. ---Ian Harrison
To me, the main benefit of partitioning is that it lets you segregate your data into chunks that more or less fit your backup media. Villazon uses an external drive as his backup, and so he backs up everything at once; that's fine. But as we've discussed here in previous issues, any malware that eats his main drive could also eat his external drive; any mechanical or physical problem (lightning strike or other electrical surge, fire, flood, theft...) that destroys the PC will probably also affect the external drive. So, working backwards, I think his is a poor choice of backup medium; and therefore his arguments in favor of throwing everything into one humongous partition also fail. He's putting his data at risk, needlessly.
Of course, maybe his PC doesn't contain important or hard-to-rebuild data. If that's the case, then the whole impetus for backup is much reduced. If a PC's mostly just a toy, who cares if you lose what's on it?
But if the PC contains valuable stuff, then you want to back it up in a way that preserves the backups even if, say, the house/office burns down or is otherwise compromised. That then leads back to the wisdom of partitioning.
As for defrag, it's mostly a speed thing. I recall from my days of formal testing at Byte and WinMag and such that you need PC speed differences of 20% or so before *everyone* can see and notice them--- lots of people just aren't that sensitive to smaller differences. But *most people* (not all--- but most) can sense 15% differences; well-attuned and experienced persons will sense 10% differences; and professional-level sensitivities can discern speed differences down to single digits. So, where you are in this spectrum of sensitivity will determine how much you value the speed increases of things like defrag.
Here's a weird analogy, but bear with me, as it makes the point clear: A minority of humans--- about 20-25% or so--- have extra taste buds. Scientists call them "supertasters" ( http://tinyurl.com/enfyn ) not with any sense of superiority, but simply to describe the extra sensitivity to tastes they have. Supertasters sense *all* tastes more intensely than the other 75% of the population, and can actually taste some things that most people simply cannot. It's why some people dislike vegetables, for example: To supertasters, foods like asparagus, broccoli and such are *extremely* bitter and even repulsively sulphurous. Yet 75% of people can eat and enjoy exactly the same foods prepared in exactly the same ways: The tastes that supertasters find so off-putting are, to most people, simply undetectable. This leads to odd effects, where some non-supertasters view supertasters as moral failures or childish persons: "Grow up and eat your vegetables!" Those non-supertasters assume that everyone is just like them--- if something tastes fine to *them,* then it must be fine for everyone, right? Nope: The same foods can taste radically different to different people. It's not a right or wrong thing; it's just a matter of how many taste buds you were born with.
Back to defrag: If you're a person sensitive to single-digit speed differences, you'll easily--- *easily*--- sense the difference between file activity when the disk is defragged versus badly fragged. But a person sensitive to only 20% or greater speed differences might not notice anything. And, frankly, some who do notice just don't care. That's perfectly fine--- to each his own.
But I personally prefer smoother operation (yes, I'm one of those annoying single-digit geeks--- and I bet a lot of you are too! <g>). I also hate to sit there waiting for my PC to do something. Even if it's just a half second needless delay for each major file operation, over the course of a day, it's like a pebble in the shoe: Not crippling, but very annoying--- especially when it's so mindlessly simple to remedy. Just defrag regularly, and all those little delays--- those little pebbles--- go away. But again, some people don't notice, or care. For them, defrag may indeed be a waste.
Defrag goes beyond speed, though: In (admittedly rare) cases of catastrophic data loss, it's much, much easer to try to dig data off a defragged disk than to try to find the pieces scattered across a messed up disk. Now, this hardly ever comes into play--- it's only happened to me twice in 25 years--- but when it does, it's the difference between a do-it-yourself data recovery taking a couple hours or maybe having to send your drive off to a data-recovery service, along with a check for some unknown amount of money, but often reaching into the thousands of dollars.
But here too, this only matters if there's important stuff on your PC--- stuff you don't want to lose, such as business records, tax or banking records, family photos, and the like. If there's nothing all that important on your PC, then who cares what happens to it? Sure, let it be sloppily backed up. Let it frag itself into unrecoverability; it doesn't matter.
I guess Luis Villazon falls into the latter category; and also is one of those people relatively insensitive to speed differences; the PC equivalent of a "non-supertaster." That's fine, for him. But there are many, many of us who do have valuable stuff on our PCs, and who do and can sense speed differences. For us, rational partitioning, good backups, and regular defrags make a real and meaningful difference.
So: His advice is way off the mark for me--- and maybe for you, too. But it's your shot to call, not his, or mine!
(And hey, I'll also admit it: I'm a supertaster, too. <g> I'll defrag my PC, but I'll skip the brussels sprouts, thank you.)
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