rumi@ethz.UUCP (Rumi Zahir) (07/03/90)
I have recently tested two 3.5" disks (170 Meg Quantum and 200 Meg
Maxtor) with a Sun workstation. Both disks have a variable number of
sectors per track. I.e. the outer tracks contain more sectors than the
inner ones. Since the disks revolve at a constant 3600 rpm, it is
obvious that data can be read off/written to the outer tracks faster
than the inner tracks. The transfer rates vary as follows:
Quantum PD 170S 1.25 na 1.67 [MBytes/sec]
Maxtor LXT-200S 9.2 12.6 14.8 [Mbits/sec]
Questions:
(1) Is it sensible to put heavily used disk partitions
(/tmp, swap area) on the fast part of the disk ?
(I'd think so, but are there other points to consider ?)
(2) Which end of the "logical scsi" disk is the "inner" respectively
the "outer" part of the disk. I.e. is logical block 0 the very
first block on the disk (like a conventional record player)
or is it the very last block on the disk ?
Does /dev/rsd0a live on the outer or on the inner tracks ?
I can very well imagine that this varies from disk to disk.
Any comments are welcome. If required, I'll summarize to the net.
rumi
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Rumi Zahir
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