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hdd arm read/write behaviour

Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by ymi, Jul 18, 2012.

ymi Notebook Geek

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does the filesystem or partition style of a hard disk change how the arm/head behaves when reading or writing data, gpt vs mbr, or ntfs vs ext for example?

Adobe Forums: Storage rules for an editing rig. Some basics.
this guy in the link above is talking about how partitioning is bad because the arm in the disk refers to the partition table at the start of the disk before every write...

Rule 1: NEVER partition a disk. You may ask why? First of all, it does not increase disk space, it just allocates the space differently. However, the major drawback is that for a partitioned disk the OS must first access a partition table at the beginning of the disk for all accesses to the disk, thus requiring the heads to move to the beginning of the disk, then when it has gotten the partition info move to the designated area on the disk and perform the requested action. This means much more wear-and-tear on the mechanics of the disk, slower speeds and more overhead for the OS, all reducing efficiency.

Click to expand...

is he talking crap? i thought the disk only referred to the partition table once, and that keeping related files together could be helpful in reducing drive wear and speed things up a bit in some cases.

ymi, Jul 18, 2012

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his recommendation is 'playing it safe'

from what I understand, a disk will TRY to keep the sectors allocated for one partition as close together as possible (this means that a two-partition hard drive will reserve the 'outer half' of tracks to one partition and the 'inner half' to the second partition).

HOWEVER, if due to previous usage of the drive and a lack of defragmentation, there may not be enough contiguous sectors for a given partition. at that point, the drive will be more than happy to split a partition up. as well, as this partition is used, the drive may be swapping data between the two 'continents' of the partition as a way of optimizing most frequently used files. furthermore, parts of a partition may be moved in an attempt to optimize A DIFFERENT partition.

in conclusion, I don't think his statement is always true (just usually true), but it still seems like wise advice.

EDIT: of course, I could just be remembering OS lectures incorrectly...

Generic User #2, Jul 18, 2012

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