Re: Disk geommetry, was Re: Kernel Upgrade: Why?

[Ookhoi <ookhoi@dds.nl>]

> > And the data on the outer side passes the heads much faster than the
> > data on the inner side. But then, there is much more data on the outer
> > side, and a piece of data on the outer side will go round in the same 
> > amount of time as a piece of data on the inner side..
> 
> I am not aware of any disks that use a higher density recording format for
> the outer tracks than they do for the inner tracks.  As far as I am aware
> (and I really haven't paid much attention to such things since ST-277's
> were state of the art) the bit density of the outer tracks is LOWER than
> the bit density of the inner tracks.  That's because the outer tracks are
> physically larger, but they hold the same number of bits.
 
There is more data on the outer tracks nowadays:
http://www.quantum.com/src/storage_basics/c3.5_part2.html#geometry

> Not that it matters.  The whole disk spins as a single unit so even if
> there were more bits on the outer tracks, you'll still wait the same
> amount of time (on average) for the sector you want to come around.  Read
> on, and I'll explain.

[knip]

> An extreme example of this would be where you dedicate an entire drive to
> a (fairly small) swap partition.  That's how the news servers I use do it.
> For something less extreme, I kind of like the recommendation made by OS/2
> gurus:  Their advice was to put the swap file in the most used partition
> on the least used drive.  You might try something like that where you put
> the swap partition in the middle of a disk that isn't used for very much.
> 
> In short, my recommendation for boosting the performance of a computer
> that uses a significant amount of swap is to add RAM to the computer.

Thanx a lot for your explanation! 

		Groetjes, Ookhoi