Drive partitioning and performance

[m1k3st4rr]

I currently dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and my hard disk is partitioned into 3 partitions (one for each OS, and a central partition for data). I am thinking of creating another partition where I will store only music (60gb+) as this is data I don't really need to access quickly.

Q: Is there a significant improvement to performance by partitioning out data such as music?

[msbachman]

Q: Is there a significant improvement to performance by partitioning out data such as music?

I can't see any reason why there should be in particular. Maybe some software you are running is checking for updates to your music folders, which considering they total 60 GB maybe that's the reason for diminished performance.

Here's a guide that might be helpful to you, it's like five pages long I think. http://partition.radified.com/ The next page link is at the bottom.

[Goatboy]

Physically speaking, the outside of a disk (cylinder 0) spins faster than the inner ones. It's explained in one of the Black-Hat talks, called "10 Things You Didn't Know About Your Harddrive."

Interestingly enough, also mentioned in the talk, is that when you install Windows on a Mac, it picks the inner-most cylinders to install to. Think about that one for a bit.

[m1k3st4rr]

I just ran a disk benchmark and my read rates on outer portions of my disk are nearly twice (70MB/s) those on inner portions (35MB/s). So logically, creating a music partition on this inner portion should be my best bet for performance... right?

[fashizzlepop]

Best performance for what? Accessing music or regular OS access? I think you got it backwards.

[sanddbox]

You're going to want the files accessed often on the outer disk - so yes, you want your music on the inner disk (the slower one) because you're not accessing them constantly.