Origin of "partition" in storage devices

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 at 14:50, Maciej W. Rozycki <macro at orcam.me.uk> wrote:
>
>  With contemporary ATA hard disks (and also SCSI disks) obviously the
> opposite was the case, due to the ZBR sector mapping scheme.

Zone bit recording?

> The outer
> cylinders had the fastest transfer speeds.

Ah, OK.

Also bearing in mind Paul K's similar point:

On Tue, 1 Feb 2022 at 15:20, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
[...]
> And very obviously wrong -- elementary geometry.
[...]
> The bits are physically longer, of course.  That's why later drives put more sectors per track as you move outward, and that means that the transfer rate on outer tracks is *higher* than for inner tracks.  And some storage systems indeed use that knowledge.

So, taking both these in mind and checking my references, I think I
had it backwards.

According to:
https://www.file-recovery.com/recovery-hard-disk-drive-basics.htm#:~:text=Tracks%20and%20Cylinders&text=Track%20numbers%20start%20at%200,track%20would%20typically%20be%201023.

Track 0 is the _outermost_ track.

So the upshot is the same: Panrix were concerned that putting a swap
partition on the highest-numbered tracks would mean it was on the
slowest part of the disk.

But I had it backwards -- that means, at the centre of the platters:
inner tracks, not outer.

Anyway, I took a virgin machine of theirs, defragged it, benchmarked
it, created a swap partition at the end of the drive, moved the swap
there, defragged both drives, and benchmarked it again.

No consistent measurable difference to 2 decimal places.

This was a real-world benchmark using MS Office, Photoshop and other
tools. A full run took 20min or so on a fast PC for 1996.

What I was able to demonstrate was that location on the hard disk of
the swap file made no measurable impact. They were very surprised by
this.

My personal takeaway from running that magazine's labs for a couple of
years is that a lot of PC performance lore had about as much validity
as astrology, homeopathy or the Myers-Briggs test.

I.e. none at all.




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