1 Feb
2022
1 Feb
'22
5:50 a.m.
On Tue, 1 Feb 2022, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
One of our favourite small PC builders, Panrix,
questioned this. They
reckoned that having the swap file on the outer, longer tracks of the
drive made it slower, due to slower access times and slower transfer
speeds. They were adamant.
With contemporary ATA hard disks (and also SCSI disks) obviously the
opposite was the case, due to the ZBR sector mapping scheme. The outer
cylinders had the fastest transfer speeds. Verified many times with
actual benchmarking of partitions placed at different parts of various
disks (only with Linux however).
I only ever came across a single very old WDC ATA disk that had a fixed
sector count per track/cylinder like a floppy (and also a stepper rather
than linear motor for the head assembly, which obviously affected seek
characteristics) and consequently whose transfer speed was the same all
across the surface.
FWIW,
Maciej