On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 10:04 AM, David J. Haines <djhaines@gmx.com> wrote:
On Wed, Dec 17, 2014 at 02:30:43AM +0100, Neven Sajko wrote:
On 16 December 2014 at 20:52, David J. Haines <djhaines@gmx.com> wrote:
gdisk is also capable of placing new partitions at the end of a block of empty space without having to do manual calcuation of the start sector. I personally find this behavior invaluable. I'm curious why do you allocate partitions to the end of the disk. Do you want to be able to resize them more easily, or something else?
For rotational media, you generally want to put your more-used data on the outside of the platters (the "beginning" of the disk from partitioning tools' perspective) because the data density of the platters is constant throughout, meaning that more data will pass under the heads in a given unit of time when they're at the outside of the platter, as opposed to the inside.
Thus, you generally want to put things like /, /var, and /home on the outside (the beginning) and things like swap on the inside (the end), unless swapping happens to be what you want your system to really excel at.
I don't know if this is logic is still true with modern rotational disks (SMR/PMR/PCMR), or if it is as simple as beginning and end of block device translating to outer and inner platter sections -- I think there is some level of indirection. It does not diminish your argument for using gdisk, though.
-- David J. Haines djhaines@gmx.com 0xAFB3D16D - F929 270F B7C3 78AE A741 434F A7C6 F264 AFB3 D16C