Ok, found this awesome guide :
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/index.htm
This guy sure knows about hard drives...
Edit : Only problem is the guide is from 2001. I still believe the info on it should be right. Don't see why modern 500GB drives should be very different from 80 or 100GB IDE drives. It's still the old heads and platters stuff. Noticed the copyright on the site goes until 2004 so maybe the author has had the occasion to add more recent info. But we can't know for sure if there's no date on the webpage itself so let's assume it's from 2001
Here's the part about the first partition being faster :
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/partSpecial-c.html
Read the info about zoned bit recording to learn more.
And there's this part about the controllers being faster than the platters and always waiting for their data (starting from "on modern disk drives") :
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/...leaving-c.html
Another interesting bit is the part about
Cylinder and Head Skew which basically means that there'll be no wait time between the readings of two subsequent cylinders or of different heads on an identical cylinder.
With those informations, I believe keeping most of the needed data close to each other could only improve read/write performances as it reduces the positioning time between two subsequent read or write operations.
But then the guy also says there's not much to be gained from that type of optimizations. The alpha user could find more inconvenients than advantages in having his drive compartimented : if he's not used to organize his stuff he risks to fill up his system drive quicker than if he had one single big partition. For my part, I'm not worried by that concern. I know where to keep my stuff and my different partitions each have a purpose a simple folder couldn't achieve.
Edit 2 : just wanted to add that this bit would also certainly make an interesting read :
Positioning vs. Transfer Performance
But as far as I'm concerned, this will have to wait tomorrow
