Ok, so the cylinders number from 0 and up are laid out from "outer" to "inner," for instance, if a hard drive contains 7800 cylinders/tracks, then 0 - 635 cylinders are the most "outer" tracks/cylinders and 7400 - 7800 are the most "inner" tracks/cylinders. The "outer" tracks/cylinders are usually read "faster" because the size of the track would accommodate larger number of sectors.
Some people suggest that it's better to have a separate partition for "/boot" in case something goes wrong with the root partition, "/". In this case, creating "/boot" partition should precede the remaining root, "/", partition.
As far as the "swap" partition, this one is a bit tricky. Obviously the outer tracks/cylinders, as I mentioned, are faster to read, so placing the "swap" partition close to the outer edge would improve accessing swap. However, this all depends on a type of application or system that user utilizes. If a program has a large data with sporadic random accesses which reduces the locality of reference and evidently results in huge working set. Obviously the larger the working set, the more swap you need and the more access it probably going to experience therefor, placement of swap becomes vital. Then comes the question of which partition is going to introduce such scenario. Let's say "/db" is one of those partitions that causes such random havoc (i.e. bad bad database design and actual implementation) so the swap should be placed closer to "/db," regardless of where it sits -- "/db" could reside on the middle or on the most inner cylinder/track so "swap" partition shouldn't be too far away from "/db" partition. Of course an unlimited RAM is the biggest plus.
Code:
primary(1) "/boot"
primary(2) "/" (everything else including /sbin, /lib, et al.)
extended
logical(1) "/db"
logical(2) "swap"
logical(3) "/var"
logical(4) "/usr"
logical(5) "/home"
logical(6) "/tmp"
Some other people also mentioned if the swap partition goes over 2 GB, then it's wiser to scatter the amount onto multiple swap partitions (which is something I am not going to do because my RAM doesn't exceed the rule of thumb RAM x 2 amount of 4 GB) but if it was, I could change the partition table to:
Code:
primary(1) "/boot"
primary(2) "/" (everything else including /sbin, /lib, et al.)
extended
logical(1) "/db"
logical(2) "swap" (1st, 2GB)
logical(3) "/var"
logical(4) "/usr"
logical(5) "/home"
logical(6) "/tmp"
logical(7) "swap" (2nd, 2GB)
And if you have multiple hard drives, then place a swap partition on each of it. Frankly, I do not know about whether that the scattered partitions should have the same exact distance accordingly from the beginning of the outer edge or can be placed base on other partitions' layout and their accessing exigency. Any suggestions?
Sincerely,