[sclug] Newbie, partitioning 120Gb HDD - recommendations?

[Tom Dawes-Gamble]

On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 10:42 +0000, David Newcomb wrote:
> Dickon Hood said:
> > I also agree with someone at sun.com (I forget who; it's quite irritating)
> > about disc partitioning: don't bother.  One big / slice is easier to
> > manage, and isn't much of a problem if you're careful.
> 
> I also agree with this. It also means there is only 1 partition table
> held in memory (and being worked on). If a machine has 4 or 5 partitions
> then there will be a performance overhead with that. I  tried this a
> couple of years ago and there is a marked improvement in having a single
> '/' partition.
> 
> Regards,
> David
> 

Do you have a description of the tests and the times?

Personally I don't see how more partitions as such make much difference.

Lets say you have a disk and divide it in to four equal partitions. For
this example we will assume the disk a has the same number of sectors on
the inner cylinder and the outer cylinder.  Copying a file from
partition one will be quicker to partition two than it would be to
partition four due to the longer seek time.  However,  Writing or
Reading to any one of the four partitions should be a uniform speed.  If
you know the position of a file in the file system you should see the
same effect if you compare the speed of coping a file near the start of
the file system to free space at the end of the file system.  

regards,
Tom.