Saturday, April 24, 2010

hard disk speed and os partition

I knew this for quite some time, but now i have experimental evidence also that installing your os and keeping your home partition near the front of the hard disk results in more responsive computer. This is because conventional hard disks are rotary which means the read data faster from the outer sectors than from the inner sectors. So the next time you install your os keep it near the front partition.
Here's a screenshot of the palimpsest utility (Applications -> system tools -> disk utility in fedora, package gnome-disk-utility) showing the read only benchmark speed and access (seek) times. As you can see the initial part has nearly double the speed than the last part. Seek times don't show any such obvious relation.

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