At 6:22 PM -0800 12/9/97, 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

In this day of zone recording where there are more sectors on the outer
cylinders of a disk there may be some advantage to putting
frequently-accessed stuff near the beginning/outer-edge of a disk as you
say.  I know of no tests to confirm that and the actual advantage would
depend on how short you are on RAM.

It's seems likely to me that effect would be swamped by the more
conventional considerations of seek time.  Even though modern drives have
seek times with large components due to settling and latency there is still
an advantage to having short rather than long seeks, so there should be
some advantage to putting the swap partition in the middle of the disk.

That assumes you have everything on one disk.  I actually prefer to have
all the system stuff on one disk, a separate disk for swap, and a third for
user files.  With two disks and less-than-overwhelming RAM I think I would
put the swap and user stuff together and put the swap near the beginning.
YMMV.

>even bother?  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)?

Both Apple HD SC Setup and disklabel programs will tell you the actual
layout of the partitions on the disk.  Whatever gets done, you can see what
it is.

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