Hey, can someone tell me if the linux swap partition should ideally be at the beginning, middle, or end of the drive?

I have heard conflicting stories

Cheers,

Duncan

Mines at the end i really cannot see it making much difference where it is, it will always be addressed the same

Depends on how important it is to system performance.

Cylinders at the beginning of the disk give a higher transfer rate.
Cylinders in the middle typically have a smaller access time, because the disk head needs to move less.

The achievable performance gains are not that big though. And the swap partition is hardly ever used if you have a lightly loaded system with a lot of memory. Some applications make heavy use of /tmp. Others (mail and news servers !) really tax /var. If you run a database, you may want to make sure the data files are on the center parts of your fastest disks.

Thanks for the advice..