On Wed, 2006-12-13 at 10:54 +1030, Tim wrote: > On Tue, 2006-12-12 at 14:36 +0200, Dotan Cohen wrote: > > I've heard that the swap should be as close to the center of the disk > > as possible- does that mean that I should use hda1 as swap? > > I've heard people say that commonly accessed drive space should be > there, others saying the difference is marginal at best. Whether doing > so as hda1 achieves it would depend on the size of all partitions that > you configure. You'd have to work out were the middle of your drive is > based on the sizing, not just the numbering, of the partitions. > > -- > (Currently testing FC5, but still running FC4, if that's important.) > > Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. > I read messages from the public lists. > On some disks, sectors are added as the diameter increases. At least I should say, they used to. Today most disks write to a small band of the overall disk, so I don't know if any of them do dynamic sectors based on track location. However the speed difference was minimal anyway, since all tracks rotate at the same speed. In fact, you could argue that in the dynamically sectored disks, having the swap at the outer segments would be faster since more data storage would exist without moving the head ( a time consuming process). On trick I have done on heavy processing tasks is to put swap on a totally separate drive. Thus the seeks were swap relative and required less access time. In some cases this can provide dramatic increases in through put. Also having a separate disk for tmp will provide you with some benefits depending on the type of software you are using. But again, YMMV. Today, if you wish to "tune" your system, you have to look at the overall task, the requirements and the architecture that addresses those requirements. For general use (not intensive scientific computation or heavy duty 3d graphics manipulation) you will not see much difference with an OOB (out of the box) PC and Linux or Windows setup. But if you are heavy into MMRPG's or VR, or scientific array manipulation or high level visualization (graphics), the picture changes, but then so does the level of personal knowledge and software analysis that is needed to make it all play nicely. Regards, Les H
