Origin of "partition" in storage devices

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

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