Platter location for OS.

[oscar6]

How do you tell which section of the platter the OS will be installed to when using multiple partitions on a HDD?... or even a single partition HDD for that matter.

 

[Billb2]

The boot sector, MBR and boot files go onto the first sector of the first HDD Windows Install sees...the one set a boot disk in the BIOS when doing the install. The Windows program files (the Windows folder, if you will) can go anywhere you want.

 

[Nothinman]

How do you tell which section of the platter the OS will be installed to when using multiple partitions on a HDD?... or even a single partition HDD for that matter.

You don't and it's not something you should be worrying about anyway.

 

[Yellowbeard]

In the past I have read recommendations to put the OS on a partition located on the outside edge of the disk. Since the armature has to consistently travel a shorter distance to read the data it will theoretically improve seek times. And, I have heard that some disk utilities will allow you to place partitions on specific regions of the platter. I have no idea if it is actually worth the time and effort or if any disk utilities can actually do this. I have heard the same advice given when placing the OS paging file onto a physically seperate HD.

 

[oscar6]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

How do you tell which section of the platter the OS will be installed to when using multiple partitions on a HDD?... or even a single partition HDD for that matter.

You don't and it's not something you should be worrying about anyway.

Then why do so many people here repeat that you should place the OS on the outside platter for best performance? :roll:


Edit: Corrected the misquote.

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: oscar6

Originally posted by: Billb2
The boot sector, MBR and boot files go onto the first sector of the first HDD Windows Install sees...the one set a boot disk in the BIOS when doing the install. The Windows program files (the Windows folder, if you will) can go anywhere you want.

Then why do so many people here repeat that you should place the OS on the outside platter for best performance? :roll:

Doesn't look to me like your OP said anything about performance. :roll:

 

[oscar6]

Abviously you misunderstood the meaning of for best performance. I was mearly stating in my previous post that MANY people say to PUT IT ON THE OUTER PLATTER to get the most performance. Regarding my question, how do all these people seem to know where the outside platter is located or how to write there selectively.

Read again old hippie. :roll:

Also I quoted the wrong person with the second post. My apolagies Billb2. Quote was meant for Nothinman. It has been changed to reflect this.

 

[Old Hippie]

Also I quoted the wrong person with the second post.

If you hadn't done that, there would have been no need for me to post.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Well, I guess one key element here is to find out if there are any disk tools that can do this. IIRC, the older version of Norton Speed Tools or Norton Speed Disk were reported to do it.

 

[oscar6]

Awesome, thanks YB.

Sorry for the mix up Old Hippie. :beer:

 

[Nothinman]

Then why do so many people here repeat that you should place the OS on the outside platter for best performance?

Because lots of people are confused about how things actually work. You might get better streaming performance from the outside of the platters but almost all disk reads during normal usage are very small, a few K here and few K there maybe a M if it's a large file and the OS does a lot of read-ahead.

 

[oscar6]

So really there is little point. I'm guessing it has been often mentioned due to a bandwagon effect. It feels good to somewhat understand the commonly misunderstood.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Tweaks like this show the best results in situations like Nothinman noted. I read up on it in a tweak guide for video editing where there is a heavy I/O demand on the HDs.

 

[Old Hippie]

Hey Again Oscar.

This is usually called short-stroking and I've read various yeas and nays about it.

There's also answers to some of your questions about partition locations at Radified.

Good Luck! :beer:

 

[Nothinman]

So really there is little point. I'm guessing it has been often mentioned due to a bandwagon effect. It feels good to somewhat understand the commonly misunderstood.

Yea, it's the same thing with most performance tweaks. The large majority are pointless or affect things other than what people say they will but they keep doing them none the less.

 

[Old Hippie]

The large majority are pointless or affect things other than what people say they will but they keep doing them none the less.

Yah, tinker, tinker, tinker........:laugh:

But...I did just run across some interesting info while browsing thru these speed comparisons of Raptors, Velociraptors, and SSDs........

Write performance:
As we've seen earlier, random writes are the SSD's achilles heel because of it's erase blocks, so performance is not nearly as good as the random reads. Disk drives on the other hand are able to cache written blocks and write them later. The partitioning trick helped with random writes as well, improving the score of the 32 GB Raptor partition by 20% and the score of the Velociraptor partition by 30% compared to the full disk.
The end result is that while the SSD is 11% faster than the 32 GB Raptor partition, the Velociraptor partition beats the SSD by 6% ? however without partitioning the SSD is 13% faster than the Velociraptor (and 43% faster than the Raptor).

I've played with partitioning in the past and agree with Nothinman, but I'm suprised at these improvements.

Go figure......

 

[Yellowbeard]

A lot of these tweak guides and the advice to use speed tweaks date back several years to the front end of XP. With every facet of system performance exponentially better these days, most of the tweaks probably do not have as much effect. But, back in the day gaining a few percentage points of performance here and there was nice. And, if you do lots of small tweaks, they do have a cumulative effect.

If HD I/O is truly an issue for the OP, go RAID-0 or 0+1 if you need redundancy.

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
A lot of these tweak guides and the advice to use speed tweaks date back several years to the front end of XP. With every facet of system performance exponentially better these days, most of the tweaks probably do not have as much effect. But, back in the day gaining a few percentage points of performance here and there was nice. And, if you do lots of small tweaks, they do have a cumulative effect.

If HD I/O is truly an issue for the OP, go RAID-0 or 0+1 if you need redundancy.

If you're referring to my post, the article was posted on 6/16/2008, and I consider a 30% increase a tad more than a tweek.

 

[Yellowbeard]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie

Originally posted by: Yellowbeard
A lot of these tweak guides and the advice to use speed tweaks date back several years to the front end of XP. With every facet of system performance exponentially better these days, most of the tweaks probably do not have as much effect. But, back in the day gaining a few percentage points of performance here and there was nice. And, if you do lots of small tweaks, they do have a cumulative effect.

If HD I/O is truly an issue for the OP, go RAID-0 or 0+1 if you need redundancy.

If you're referring to my post, the article was posted on 6/16/2008, and I consider a 30% increase a tad more than a tweek.

No, sorry I wasn't clear. I was referring back to the old XP tweak guides that popped up everywhere pre-SP1. Your post is an indicator of the exponentially better stuff I referred to.

 

[oscar6]

This has been an absolute wonderful discussion. Thanks for the insight. It seems as some of this info should be in some sort of a sticky. :beer: