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creating partition- single fixed drive

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by mikeaaaaaaaaa9 1 view

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I am trying make my system as efficient as possible. I understand that creating multiple partitions on a single fixed drive and placing the swap file on its own partition can increase efficiencey. My question - I know there are multiple platters within a drive, when information is placed on them, is it placed sequentially (1 platter, then the next) or do the heads start on all platters writing data contiguously (starts writing on beginning of each platter simultaneously so data is close to beginning of all platters where read/write heads are closest)? If it is sequential, from plater to platter, how do I determine where (or what size) my partition should be so that my swap file partition can be at the beginning of the platter, thereby reducing seek time?

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by timwalsh

Actually, the efficiency gained with placing you swap file on a different partition on the same disk arises more from the fragmentation issue. By placing it in its own partition you reduce swap file fragments being spread all over the disk and being intemingled with fragments from the rest of your files (although this really isn't as detrimental to efficiency as it might sound).

Any performance boost gained by what you are attempting to accomplish would not be noticeable to you because information can only be read from one location at a time in s single disk.
You may gain some noticeable efficiency by placing you swap file on a separate hard drive, but even this would be negligible in the overall operation of your system.

If yoursystem is so har pressed that the efficiency of your swap file is a significant factor for your computers operation, you would be better off adding more physical RAM. the efficiency of swap files really become critical only when the memory requirements of your running processes are larger than the amount of physical memory installed.

by thechas

There was a fairly involved Tech Republic discussion on the "optimum" location for the swap file.

The best way to "optimize" swap file performance is to use a program like Norton Speed Disk that moves the swap file to the fastest area of the drive. This is normally at the beginning of the primary DOS partition.

Seting up multiple partitions allows you to control cluster size so that a 100 byte file doesn't take up 8K bytes of drive space.
As far as partition size, I use the cluster sizetransition points as my guide.
I setup my drives so that they are near the maximum capacity for a given cluster size.

The main performance advantage of having the swap file on it's own partition, is that the system will be able to perfrom scandisk and defrag on the other drives without having to re-start as much. This is because the swap file isn't causing access on the drive being processed.
And yes, having the swap file on it's own partition reduces fragmentation on the "C:" drive.

There is an article on partition planning at www.aumha.org

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