Quote:
Originally Posted by Girderman
My operating assumption is that the hard drive itself is the rate determining step in the process, and so whatever is done on the platters is going to produce neglible results.
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I totally agree on the first part : you'll never have better performances on a 5400rpm disk than on a 10.000rpm Raptor. That's why laptops are horrible when it comes to drive's performances.
But I believe optimizing the position of the files on the platter can produce better results on identical drives.
The theoretical basis of my argument is that the transfer rate is better on the outer border of the platter than it is in the center, and from what I understood, it would be logical to assume that keeping the files that are actually used by the OS close to each others would reduce the time lost for head positioning.
Now I have the same interrogation as Girderman : will the gains be negligible or could we actually gain some seconds on startup or when running applications doing this ?
Now the idea of keeping one partition for the OS still has the benefits of reducing the fragmentation factor of that partition. But again that's more related to the habits of the user. If you can't refrain from downloading/storing your stuff on your desktop or in your documents folders, this layout is not for you.