justpassingby

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 ?

Girderman

That the rate-determining step in data transfer is not seek times (how long it takes the wiper thingie to move around) but rather the electronics behind it. It's all moving in and out of the same hard drive, so it's all going to be limited by that.

Otherwise you'd be buying your hard drives buy the technical characteristics of their read-write times, rather than the raw data transfer rates.

But all I'm asking is for some back-up. I have my own theory and am just as likely to be wrong as right. Just want to know if someone that really DOES know says it's one way or the other.

justpassingby

Well, that's why I bought my raptor. It has both great seek times and a great transfer rate.
I'll try to find some white papers on hard drives for next time.

Just wanted to know if you were seeing anything wrong in placing 95% of the most frequently used files on the fastest 10% of the disk ? I juste hate it when I hear the HDD scream for 30 seconds when I run word on my brother's computer.

Girderman

It's just that I've heard this whole idea debunked so often that I need something more than one persons say-so before I can re-write the data.

justpassingby

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

Girderman

http://www.techsupportforum.com/hardware-support/hard-drive-support/160168-can-partitioning-optimize-hard-drive-access.html#post926569

adidas1677

Wow thats a ton of great information. Reading this over I am actually going to go out and buy a new internal drive to set up partitions. I just noticed that the RPM speed of my internal drive sucks compared to the new drives on the market. Will that have any impact on game speed at all?

Here is the drive that I was going to go pick up today. They have it on sale for 130.00 at Best Buy. Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS hard drive.

Capacity 500 GB
Interface Serial ATA-300
Rotational Speed: 7200 rpm
Access Time: 8.9 ms
Type of Drive: Internal

And you have mentioned many times of a program that you need to partition a hard drive. What is the one that you think does the best job. I dont mind buying top of the line if it is going to help out in the long run.

Thanks again for the help guys.

justpassingby

@ Girderman : good idea. Let's stop hijacking this thread

@ adidas1677 : I suggest you follow the starting discussion in the thread Girderman just created before trying anything on your own. Partitioning is only one of the final steps of the many optimizations you can do on your computer. You would hardly see any differences on a non-optimized system.

But feel free to have a look at these articles since they provide easier solutions to keep a computer clean and fast :
http://www.techsupportforum.com/arti...r-dollars.html
http://www.techsupportforum.com/arti...imisation.html

And here's a recent guide about choosing your hard drive (march 2007). It has less technical considerations than the guide I provided above but is more appropriate as a "buying guide" :
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/...nce/index.html

Girderman

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073