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I have a 400gig hard drive.
I have one partition, on which Windows is installed.
I am running a defrag as a precursor to shrinking the volume so I can put on another partition.
In the process of running this defrag, one third-party software recommended I "move all system files to start of hard-drive to increase performance".
This got my wondering.
Hypothetically, let's say I put Windows on the first 200gigs and Linux on the second 200gigs.
Does Windows have a slight performance advantage in this case as it's at the "start" of the hard-drive, or does the read/write arm of it adjust for being in the second partition?
Stupid question...but it popped into my head and I can't find an answer !
Further background reading on this area would be much appreciated also, its quite interesting! :)
The (small) performance difference only exists when zone bit recording is employed, but then all modern HDDs do use ZBR. This difference in data rates exists only at the platter interface, and is just one component in the overall access time. See https://superuser.com/questions/823827/hard-drive-how-type-of-i-o-access-influences-access-time/824996
– sawdust – 2017-10-18T23:06:25.440