Hard drive Inner or Outer tracks???

[LeftSide]

What part of the hard drive is faster the inner or outer tracks? I was into computers a long time ago and the inner tracks used to be much faster. Now my friend is telling me that the outer tracks are faster??? Is this true? Im asking because I want to make a seperate partition for my swap file, and want to know where to put it (on the inner or outer tracks)

 

[LeftSide]

(used to be faster because the fat was written on the inner tracks and wouldn't physicaly have to move as far to retreive data)

 

[kamper]

uh, if I'm not mistaken, they're the same. Obviously they both spin at the same rpm and I think that the data is denser closer to the inside so that one complete track holds the same amount of data no matter how far from the center it is.
I wasn't aware you could purposely place a partition on a specific part of the disk (figured it was up to the disk to decide where the data went).

 

[Jeff7]

I would expect so - I know that optical drives read faster as they approach the outside tracks. So you get the faster...is it called angular velocity? as you approach the outer tracks. Anyone know, is the following at all accurate?:
inner tracks - faster seek times
outer tracks - faster read/write times

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
I would expect so - I know that optical drives read faster as they approach the outside tracks. So you get the faster...is it called angular velocity? as you approach the outer tracks. Anyone know, is the following at all accurate?:
inner tracks - faster seek times
outer tracks - faster read/write times

To some extent, yes. However, you also have to take into account that the disk geometry is not perfectly linear -- the blocks are denser near the middle, where the disk spins more slowly (as opposed to CD-ROMs, where the pit size is independent of the radial distance). This is something that varies even from one disk model to another, so it's hard to make general rules about it.

Transfer rates are definitely highest near the outer edge (as you can see on any hard disk benchmark), and seek times *for nearby blocks* is usually lowest there as well (since it takes less time for a block near the outer edge to rotate into the correct position to be read). But since the blocks are denser near the center of the disk, average seek times can sometimes be lower there. Again, this is highly dependent on the exact disks and controller in use, so don't count on it.

Also note that on hard disks, the 'outer' blocks are the *first* ones (as opposed to optical drives, which write from the inside out).

Edit:

I wasn't aware you could purposely place a partition on a specific part of the disk (figured it was up to the disk to decide where the data went).

It's actually up to the operating system, although in some cases (as with a RAID controller), the OS may not really 'know' where the data is going on the disk. But you can certainly place partitions in certain locations on the disk, although the benefits of doing this are pretty minimal nowadays; if you need more speed, you're better off just buying a separate disk or using a RAID array of some sort. Utilities like Norton Speed Disk (and possibly Partition Magic) can do this; I don't think Windows offers much support for it.

 

[LeftSide]

inner tracks - faster seek times
outer tracks - faster read/write times

That is what I am thinking. Back in the day hard drives had the same compression all the way around the disk. Now I am told that the Data on the outside tracks is brocken into sections so its more compressed. But is the fat still put on the inside tracks? And I think the swap file would need the faster seek times correct?

 

[LeftSide]

Thanks Matthias that clears things up