Drive Setup for YDL

[Rick Thomas]

Well, you learn something new every day.  That's good to know that in YDL I
don't have to worry about other partitions getting renumbered when I split a
low-numbered partition.

As far as physical locations of partitions... In the old days (when the
world was new and everything was simple) it did make a difference because
you wanted to keep the amount of disk arm travel to a minimum, so as to
minimize the time spent seeking.  Today it hardly matters because things are
"fast enough" without such tweaking. Also, many disks today have "logical"
cylinder numbers that don't necessarily correlate in any way to physical
cylinder numbers so you can't know if you're doing harm or good by tweaking
things.

There were even people who cared so much about getting the last milligram of
performance out of their machines that they went as far as to ignore half
the space on a disk drive because doing so would halve the seek time.  Not a
trick I would recommend today.

Rick



> From: mike newman <mwnewman@math.uwaterloo.ca>
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 19:28:29 -0400 (EDT)
> To: yellowdog-general@lists.terrasoftsolutions.com
> Subject: Re: Drive Setup for YDL
> 
> when i installed 2.3 (haven't made the 3.0 plunge yet) to my new hard
> drive, i first partitioned it in apple's disk doctor as:
> 12 gig unallocated
> 5 gig HFS
> rest unallocated then on installing ydl2.3 i chopped up the first block
> i then and installed ydl in the first block (suitably subdivided), and
> made a few /backup partitions in the end block as well. i ended up doing
> several reinstalls (and repartitioning) of ydl into the first 12 gig. the
> partition number of the 5 gig HFS never changed, and it seems that the
> physical order and numerical order of my partitions do not match. doesn't
> seem to be a problem; in fact, aside from looking at the partition tables
> i'm not sure it's possible to tell.
> 
> i would be curious to know if there are reasons to put partitions near the
> top/bottom/middle of a disk? aside from hardware or software compatibility
> issues, if one has a choice is there a preference?
> 
> mike newman
> 
> 
>