[H-GEN] partition advice

[Robert Brockway]

On Mon, 22 Feb 1999 davidj at amh.com.au wrote:

> The primary FAT, or primary superblock is in the center of the drive, and

There are multple copies of the superblock on each filesystem, and each
filesystem has a different superblock.  Not sure waht you mean here.

> using some form of tree, get to anywhere in the disk in minimum _average_
> time. The theory behind this is the disk heads are on average, located
> in the center of the platters. 

The system I recomended is the one that has been used on unix system for
years as it works well for unix - the fastes part of the disk has the most
importand and most often needed binaries, as well as /tmp which is written
too often.

> So I'd do
> 
> /home
> /usr
> /
> SWAP
> /tmp
> /var

I can see what you are saying about having / near the middle of the disk,
that is the reason the other system (the one I am recomending) puts swap
near the middle of the disk.  It isn't always possible unfortunately.
Having / near the beginning of the disk does actually result in a
performance boost.

I really must recomend against putting /home near the start of the disk :)

If you put / and /usr near the start of the disk, the drive arm will
spend most of its time there.  So putting swap and /tmp close by is a win,
and all on the physically fastest part of the drive.

> The linux filesystem code does do some elementary tag queuing, but 
> the efficieny of it depends greatly on the actual layout of the sectors
> over the platter(s).

See my other post about why this also works from the point of probability.
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au
                                robert at humbug.org.au, r.brockway at uq.net.au
			 WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
			 Founder of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)


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