On Wed, Apr 21, 1999 at 03:56:31PM -0700, debian-user list wrote: > The HOWTO, and the person responding to the Mindcraft survey, both assert > that the part of the disk furthest from the spindle is the fastest, and that > one can use this to optimise performance. While I don't doubt the first part > of the statement, I was under the impression that once you hit a drive's > onboard logic, geometry is pretty much up for grabs these days, and > attempting to put something on the "outer edge" of the disk is an excerise in > self-delusion. The HOWTO is dated 1997, and the information therein may be > older. Does anyone out there have some knowledge of current hard drive > manufacturing?
It's true that you can't gather much from the sector and head numbers on a modern drive, but I think common drives can be expected to access mostly sequentially across the cylinders. I've always heard that the lower-numbered cylinders were on the outer tracks. How many filesystems start packing data in at the beginning? Would a drive manufacturer want to optimize or decrease performance in that situation? > Or better yet, some numbers from formal or informal experiments in drive > partition performance? Yes, I'd like to see this too. Wouldn't be hard to do, but I don't have a spare drive at the moment. - Marsh
