Same disk, 2 partitions, different speeds?

[perdomot]

Got my old WD 640GB HDD cut into two partitions and noticed that the first partition gets reads/writes about 110MB/s while the 2nd one averages about 80MB/s. Why is that and should I just merge the two partitions into just one and will that maintain my higher speed? Both partitions are the same size FYI. Thanks.

 

[Coup27]

Remember how a hard drive works. The outer most edge of the platter has the fastest read/write speeds and it slows down the closer it gets to the centre.

 

[BrightCandle]

If you take a read speed/write speed across the entire disk you'll see they degrade to around half their speed in the later bytes compared to the earlier ones. Thus splitting the disk means that the second partition always starts off slower, but conversely everything in the first one can never be moved to the later one by the file system. Reducing the actual disk used in this way is called short stroking and it can improve performance if you do most of the work on only 10% of the disk or so.

But if you have no actual reason for splitting the disk just make it a single partition, its easier and everything will get the best speed possible.

 

[Emulex]

short-stroke and stripe the fastest area into a raid-0 for maximum performance.