On Mar 5, 2012 5:10 AM, "Alan McKinnon" <alan.mckin...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Correct. Those drives are all the same style as you've > been using for years. If partitions start at 63, that's just an msdos > convention. For reasons I've never understood, Windows liked to reserve > the first 32k for some purpose or other. >
Partitions start at sector 63 because traditionally that's the first sector of the second cylinder. If the partition starts at a lower sector, then the metadata of the filesystem might get split between two cylinders, causing a performance impact due to drive head repositioning (older -- like, *really old* drives -- have slow and inaccurate actuators; repositioning heads takes time because after moving the heads, the location needs some fine tuning by reading some calibration data embedded in every cylinder). Rgds,
