Partitioning for Speed

[Jeff <jcoppock1@attbi.com>]

I've seen a reference to two regarding the location of a partition on
the HDD being faster than other parts of the HDD.  I've been trying to
get a definitive answer on this and it's still not clear to me.  

1.  What part of the HDD is faster, the inside (closest to the center
    of the platter) or the outside?

    It makes some sense to me that the outside would be faster due the
    fact that it's moving faster, but this may not be a determining
    factor.

2.  When using cfdisk to partition, does it start the first partition
    by default at the beginning, or on the inside, of the HDD?  

    IIRC, it refers to this as "the beginning of the free space".

3.  I would want to put my swap and / partitions in the fastest part
    of the HDD, leaving /home and /usr/local for the rest of the
    drive.  Does this make sense?  [That's how I like to partition,
    those four mount points.]

My intention here is to learn about the HDD and partitioning for
speed in general.  My purpose is general usage, nothing specific.

thanks,
jc

-- 
Jeff Coppock		Systems Engineer
Diggin' Debian		Admin and User