>> There is one more philosophical side effect of this question - speed. >> The closer the partition is placed to the outer cylinders, the faster >> the data are read from it. > > More a methaphysical question. On modern disks, the correspondence > between block/cyl number and physcial location is very blurred. > > B B B B -Otto
Yeah, Otto, I'm aware of it, and still that makes me experiment every time I got an opportunity to. Anyway, you can use your system for years, upload and delete little and large files, but defragmentation ratio is very close to 0.0%. Either the system is not aware of this location blur or really the system sees that the file blocks location is indeed "convenient" for the system. In my experiments I saw large avi files being copied to the "outsider" /usr from a flash device 4.5mb p/s, and to the "insider" /var slower - depending on the size of the /usr - from 2.7mb p/s to 3.2mb p/s. I'm not insisting, I'm only telling about the results of my experiments... :) I know very little about physical design of HDD's and the vendors do not feel like sharing that information. :) -- ### Coonardoo - PQP8P=P8QP:P0 Q QQP=Q / The Well In The Shadow / Le Puits Dans L'Ombre ###
