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!