Messages in this thread | | | From | John Bradford <> | Subject | Re: Benefits from computing physical IDE disk geometry? | Date | Fri, 18 Apr 2003 14:25:23 +0100 (BST) |
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> > Is the basic assumption that lower block numbers are generally located > > in zones nearer the outside of the disk still true, though? I.E. do > > you know of any disks that 'start from the middle'? I usually > > recommend that people place their swap and /var partitions near the > > beginning of the disk, (for a _slight_ improvement), but maybe there > > is a good reason not to do this for some disks? > > I generally put swap in the middle of the disk, not on the > "fastest" end. The "fast" end is faster for large transfers, > but that isn't what swap is about.
Well, I was thinking of machines that are really starved of physical RAM, 32 MB or less, even down to 4 MB. I generally run swapless on 'real' machines :-).
Also, the higher capcity tracks mean less seeks, so the chance of not having to seek at all increases slightly.
> Swap tends to have lots of small transfers now and then, in between > other io. So you want a short seek from wherever the > access arm is to keep latency down, and the middle of the > disk has short way both from inner and outer tracks.
Yeah, that would probably be a better idea for machines which are only really hitting swap on occasions, instead of all the time :-).
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