[ale] On swap space (was Re: who is eating my drive)

[Jim Kinney]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 31 May 2011 18:01:17 -0400
> Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I know the extended partition stuff is DOS relic configuration
> > workarounds. Does a Linux system really care about where a partition
> > is? Is it just "drive space" as far as the kernel is concerned or are
> > partitions in the extended one treated differently? This is only in
> > reference to modern SATA drives. I know old kernels with really old
> > drive (early IDE stuff) it did matter.
>
> The only (minor) difference between locations on a spinning drive is
> the speed.  One end of the drive has higher sequential throughput than
> the other.  I've never had much luck trying to make sure of that fact
> in practice, though.
>

My (30 seconds of) digging shows that drive rotation speeds vary to keep the
data rate passing under the head nearly constant thus making the data rate
out of the drive nearly constant for reads larger than the cache. seek time
is related to disk diameter and how fast the head arm and swing.

>
> Pat
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20110531/31e93984/attachment.html