Partitions and performance.

[laptoplinux]

Yet another partitioning question.

Can the way a drive is partitioned significantly effect the performance of a PC (ie: Partition order, placement of swap, etc)? I noticed that I may have done a less than ideal partition and that my PC is running a bit clunky (slow boots etc) and am wondering if they are related. It is significantly more pronounce with Mint12 then it was with Ubuntu.

I have attached a snapshot of gparted and Windows Disk Management tool. Is there anything that is immediately noticeable to the partitioning wizards out there? Particularly with the sda3 extended partition as I can't really mess with the Win 7 stuff.

Do I need to do a reinstall?

[DrHu]

Other than having only a small boot partition, any partitioning scheme for a normal PC (not raid, for example) as a desktop OS is not significantly affected by whichever partitioning scheme you use.

The standard of install everything on one partition / (Boot OS + load desktop and running services applications) runs almost as fast as an ideally partitioned drive(s)

The size of the partition/hard drive is obviously a factor, but modern drives at 7200rpm platter speed and fast transfer rates for the IO, would not be very much limited or improved by choosing small partitions..

Some info on partitioning schemes..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(computing)

http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/AUnix1 ... ioning.htm
http://partition.radified.com/
--larger (modern) hard drives..

[laptoplinux]

Other than having only a small boot partition, any partitioning scheme for a normal PC (not raid, for example) as a desktop OS is not significantly affected by whichever partitioning scheme you use.

The standard of install everything on one partition / (Boot OS + load desktop and running services applications) runs almost as fast as an ideally partitioned drive(s)

The size of the partition/hard drive is obviously a factor, but modern drives at 7200rpm platter speed and fast transfer rates for the IO, would not be very much limited or improved by choosing small partitions..

Some info on partitioning schemes..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_(computing)

http://content.hccfl.edu/pollock/AUnix1 ... ioning.htm
http://partition.radified.com/
--larger (modern) hard drives..

Thank you for the information DrHu. I realized the links I provided were dead so attached screen shots of gparted and Windows Disk Manager.

[jimzhong]

The arrangement of your partitions makes nearly no effect on the performance.
A SSD is a perfect solution to slow booting.

[laptoplinux]

Thanks everyone for the information.

[mintybits]

It's about how fast disk data can be moved to and from system RAM where it can be used by the uP, and how much can be moved into RAM in anticipation of being needed.
More RAM and bigger scoops of disk data each time improve performance.

If you are keen to squeeze out the last drop of performance it may be worth researching how mechanical disk drives work. As you know they store data in concentric rings, which across multiple platters form cylinders. Reading a cylinder is pretty fast but moving the heads from one cylinder to another cylinder is very slow. This is why striping data across multiple mechanical disks (aka RAID0) really speeds things up because one can be moving to the next cylinder while the first is still reading. Minimising cylinder transitions improves performance (such as compacting the data on as few cylinders as possible - such as by defragmenting).

Another consideration is the size of "blocks" of data that linux reads and writes to a disk and how this compares to the disks' RAM buffer and how large the disk's internal block size is. Most disks use 512 byte physical sectors as the minimum quanta of data but newer, large disks are using 4096 byte physical sectors and present them to linux as 512 byte sectors for backwards compatibility. It helps performance if the partition "sector" boundaries line up with the physical sector boundaries on the disk - so on these types of disk make sure partitions start on sector addresses that are multiples of 8.

Just a couple of things to research off the top of my head.