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I have in principal 3 big partitions on my Netbook. One Windows, one for shared files, one for Ubuntu. I recently find out (using hdparm) the the hardisk seems to have much better perfomance on the first 2/3 (~ 60MB/s) than on the last 1/3 (~ 40MB/s). I am thinking to delete the second partition and create new partitions for "swap" and / directly after Windows. Does this effort make sense?

I also wanna upgrade to 10.4/10.10 but keep the option to go back to the old system, so maybe I install ubuntu completely in a/this new partition?

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Only the transfer rate does vary over the whole capacity of the harddrive, but not the access time. In pratice, the access time is much more important than the sequential read/write speed. I doubt that you would see a real performance increase during you normal usage.

If you're reinstalling anyway, I would put the most performance-critical partitions to the beginning. I would not repartition just for the reordering, it's too much effort for too little gain.

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  • +1 good answer. As an addendum, hdparm will indeed measure raw throughput, but the buffer cache in Linux is so efficient that the hard throughput is a poor measure of actual performance. A block that lives in memory has no head seek time and has 10x(?) the throughput.
    – msw
    Feb 5, 2011 at 14:52
  • Thank you. I also realized with 2GB it runs quite smooth, while with 1GB I had much swapping there it could have made a bigger difference maybe!
    – Marcel
    Feb 5, 2011 at 15:32
  • @Marcel More RAM is often the most effective upgrade. The fastest swap partition is the one that isn't needed at all. Feb 5, 2011 at 15:33

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