HD Partitioning

[wobbe]

When you create a new (first) partition where does it end up on the hard drive?
I want to make sure that my O.S. and swap end up on the outside (fast part) of the hard drive. Are partitions created from the outside to inside on the other way around?

[WFHC-WI]

The first partition is built at the outer edge of the platter. The performance hit of having a partition on the center of the disk rather than the edge really is negligible.

If you are looking at a server product, let me recommend one of HP's new G6 offerings that can use solid state drives (SSD)... these put prior IDE, SCSI, and SAS drives to shame performance-wise. The one disadvantage is that they currently don't offer hardware mirroring or striping for SSDs (although Windows can do that for you).

Good luck, your points are welcomed if this helps!

[WFHC-WI]

You can now do hardware-based disk mirroring on SSD drives if you purchase the P712 Smart Array controller board.