Quote:
Originally Posted by Girderman
It was this notion that I was looking for, as it is the opposite of what I understand. I'm open minded. Do you have any link or anything that would substantiate this ?
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Well, these are some facts, or things I believe to be facts :
1) The outer part of the platter is the part with the highest transfer rates. The partitions on a disk are arranged starting from the outer part of it towards the inner parts of it (yeah, that's just the opposite of how CD's are burnt). The first partition being on the outer most part of the disk benefits then from higher transfer rates. If you're wondering about how the data is written to the different platters, well it's just spread equally among them, a bit like on a raid-0 array.
2) disk-swapping is what causes the most of the delays you experience when an non cpu-heavy application is running slowly. By keeping all the needed data on a confined space, you prevent the heads to have to move accross a larger distance.
Conclusion : by keeping all the files the system will need when booting on a small first partition, you'll prevent the loss of performances due to the OS slowly migrating towards the center of the drive because of the updates getting scattered all accross the drive. And if you install the applications you use daily on the same partition, they'll start faster since the heads will have to cover a smaller distance between the system files and those app's files.
That's the same theory that's behind the advice to set the page file on the first partition of a separate disk : it decreases the disk-swapping phenomenon and ensures the swap file will stay on the fastest part of the disk.
+ keeping your system and swap files separated from any data that can cause quick fragmentation, like downloads, will prevent those files from getting fragmented too quickly.
Off course, when using such a partition scheme, you should ensure the programs you will use will not be installed on a separate partition far away from the system partition. That's why my own drive has a 15GB system partition, a 45GB programs partition and the rest for backup and media files. I install all the programs I use daily on the system partition. Bigger programs I only use from time to time, like games, are on the next 45GB partition. This ensures the programs files will never be more than 50GB away from the system files, and is still an improvement over a big single 150GB partition. I wouldn't care about my games taking 1 more second to load anyway, all I care about is my compy booting to its fully usable state (antivirus loaded, no more hourglass pointer, wireless network connected, ...) in less than a minute on a full-featured motherboard, and programs like word, ie or firefox taking less than a sec to launch.
What were you understanding that was contradicting this ?
