At 3:22 Uhr +0100 10.12.1997, Colin Wood wrote:
>I've heard that it sometimes helps system responsiveness to have a swap
>partition on the outer edge/cylinders of a drive since these should have
>faster access times.  Does anyone have any experience with this?  Should I
>even bother?

It depends.  ;)

You can expect fewer track-to-track switches per MB on the outer rings and
substantially higher physical data rates.

BUT: With a -current disk drive you get data transfer rates that are well
beyond what Mac II hardware (53c80 ~2 MB/s) or Quadra hardware (53c96 ~3.5
MB/s) can handle. An IBM DCAS-34430 (4GB, 5,400 rpm) eg. is capable of
delivering between 4.8 and 7.8 MB/s -- if the CPU can handle it.

There's another effect to consider: Placing frequently-accessed partitions
in the middle of the disk may well cut down head seek time.

Placing frequently-accessed partitions on different spindles may have a
greater effect, though.

SMM:1 Installing and Operating 4.4BSD UNIX ch. 2.5 discusses this in
greater detail.

>Also, if I format a drive and create a swap partition first,
>will most formatting utilities actually put that partition first (i.e. on
>the outer cylinders of the drive)?

For most (MacOS) formatters, you can switch the partition display between
some arbitrary/alphabetical/whatever sorting and the *physical* layout.
IIRC, APS 4.x partition-wise fills a disk up from the inner cylinders.

	hauke


--
"It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)