[PLUG] Partitioning Schemes

Steve Bonds 1s7k8uhcd001 at sneakemail.com
Tue Jul 16 23:39:09 UTC 2002


On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Felix Lee flee at aracnet.com XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:

> I think, position of partitions on a disk is generally pointless
> micro-optimization.  My instinct is if there is a difference, it's not
> a big enough difference to matter for average use.  Benchmark it and
> make sure.  This type of thing needs to be benchmarked; it's quite
> hard to predict the right answer, especially now that disks are very
> smart devices.

I'll definately agree with this.  However, I understand that some folks
have lots of free time and want to play around.  ;-)

Some drives' (and SCSI cards') translation from SCSI blocks to disk blocks
do not necessarily follow the start-at-the-outside-and-work-your-way-in
convention.  This is especially true if using CHS addressing rather than
LBA.

Benchmark to be sure, but if performance is that critical, then there are
lots of better things to do.  (Caching, striping, etc.)

Be careful of developing some bizarre, hard to maintain disk layout in the
name of performance.

  -- Steve






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