How much of that is true? Do the tracks leading from the most outer to the most inner vary in speeds? (fastest to slowest). And in such when creating partitions on a drive, say 4 partitions, are they stacked in tracks from inner to outer? (Meaning c partition would be fastest, f partition the slowest).
Disclaimer: it's been a few years since I last attended hardware design classes and technology probably has changed a bit. With that in mind...
- Think of a wheel and how the rim spins way faster than the hub. Same with a hard drive. Doesn't really influence data transfer rates though because the nearer you get to the rim, the more data gets spread out over the platter (otherwise the head can't discern the individual bits).
Lots of R&D has and is being done on this subject, though, so perhaps these days the rim does sport the higher transfer rates. OTOH, there's also been a lot of research on squeezing more bits into each unit of physical drive space, which could mean the regions near the hub have the highest transfer rates since the platter moves slower there, giving the head more time to dissemble the information. YMMV.
- The middle of the drive is the best position to store often accessed data because, on average, the head will be closer to the center than to the edges, thus seek times will be shorter. Only a rule of thumb though: if the file you want resides in sector x, and the head is at (x + 1), the disk first has to make a whole spin. You'll understand what that does to performance.
Disk performance seems to be a lot of voodoo and hearsay when applied to most modern disks.
Rather than physical location (ie, closer to the hub vs. farther away), using diskpar (along with diskpart for 2003) to align tracks relative to zone bit recording is where true performance (in windows) lies (up to 20% performance increase in some applications).
