disk stuff (was: still havin probs :)

[Randy Reames]

On Sun, 22 Oct 2000 23:44:46 -0500 (CDT), Jeffrey Watts said:
>  
>  The outer edge spins faster than the inside, in terms of meters per
>  second.  It used to be that any given track (ring) of a disk had the same
>  amount of sectors, so the inside track and the outside track contained the
>  same amount of data, so the data was read at the same rate regardless of
>  the position of the head.
>  
>  Modern hard disks have long since stopped wasting space, and the outer
>  tracks contain many, many more sectors than the inside tracks.  Since the
>  platter rotates at a constant speed, more sectors pass under the heads on
>  the outer tracks every second than the inner tracks.
>  
>  Now, generally one wants the most heavily read and written to area of the
>  disk to be on the outside, to take advantage of this performance.  There
>  are other things to consider, such as seek time (you don't want two
>  heavily used areas on the disk to be far apart, as head seek is the
>  bottleneck), but that's not necessarily a concern since many modern hard
>  drive microcontrollers (the ones on-disk) and hard drive controllers know
>  the disk geometry and organize writes to more efficiently use the head's
>  motion (similar to Out-Of-Order execution on processors).
>  
>  There's a lot more to it, but for most folks outside is best.
> 
 
Ah I see. Now that I think about that does make more sense. How modern is
modern? I am still using a giant 9g scsi Seagate 15lb heater hd. Circ 95 I
think. (Eh, its still working and only half full.) I have swap and /home near
the middle and /etc and /var outside. Think I should change?
BTW if anyone has a 9g-ish hd they want to get rid of...

>  
>  Yes.  All disk media in computers starts at the middle and goes outward.  
>  That's why when you look at a CD you'll see that most of them don't go all
>  the way out to the far edge of the disc.
>  

Ha, Ya know I should have known that, actually I think I did. I need more
coffee and/or sleep.
-- 
Randy Reames	      Webmaster 	 Debian User
http://www.unixreview.com     http://sysadminmag.com

Gimp and vi, all I really need.