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I have a 400gig hard drive.

I have one partition, on which Windows is installed.

I am running a defrag as a precursor to shrinking the volume so I can put on another partition.

In the process of running this defrag, one third-party software recommended I "move all system files to start of hard-drive to increase performance".

This got my wondering.

Hypothetically, let's say I put Windows on the first 200gigs and Linux on the second 200gigs.

Does Windows have a slight performance advantage in this case as it's at the "start" of the hard-drive, or does the read/write arm of it adjust for being in the second partition?

Stupid question...but it popped into my head and I can't find an answer !

Further background reading on this area would be much appreciated also, its quite interesting! :)

Simon Kiely
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1 Answers1

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On a hard drive, the partitions closer to the beginning do get better throughput than those closer to the end.

From the question Why does performance of a regular hard drive decrease over the duration of a benchmark while SSD doesn't?, you can see this in the form of a graph:

Hard drive slows down as you go from the beginning to the end

The top answer sums this up succinctly:

The mechanical HD is being scanned from the outside inward. Since the disk is spinning at a constant 7200rpm, it's covering more data per second at the outside than the inside.

And as I added:

the ratio of speed of the outside of the HDD to the inside is about 1.8.

Deltik
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