[aclug-L] Re: Linux as an alternative to a Windows desktop

["Jonathan Hall" <flimzy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> >Now I'm not real hardware savvy nowdays, but in all my years of computing
> >(since 1980) I've never heard of one part of a hard drive being "slower"
> >than another.
> >
> >Care to explain?
> >
> >
> speed of access, related to seek time.
> on an average, sectors located near the spindle are faster to access
> than sectors located near the outer edge.
>
> This becomes very noticeable when the drive has to access a swap
> partition that is toward the outer edge and with limited memory is doing
> a lot of swaps.

That is noticable not because of the location of the swap file in relation
to the disk, but in relation to other data accessed on the disk.

A hard disk spins at a constant speed, so unless you store different amounts
of data on different cylinders, the access time should be identical on the
inner and outter tracks.

What takes time is moving the heads, which happens when you place your swap
partition away from the rest of your data.

In practice, it's usually easiest to put your swap partition "in front of"
your most heavily used data partition.  For this reason, I usually put /,
swap, then /usr.  Because filesystems generally fill up from front to back,
most of my most heavily used data will be at the front of /var, and thus
close to the swap partition, so moving the heads between these two areas of
the disk should not take long.

In theory, if you had a back-to-front filling filesystem, it would make
sense to put your swap partition at the end of it--perhaps on the outtermost
cylinders of the drive.

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