Art of demagogics Re: Gentoo Linux faster app-load than (Mandrake|Fedora)

[Jean Francois Martinez]

On Fri, 2003-10-10 at 16:45, Mark Mielke wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 08:38:02AM +0200, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> > Another point is that in my experience people who write articles
> > in Linux magazines are completely incompetent at benchamrking.
> > For instance comparisons between distros are only valid if you install
> > both distros from scratch in the SAME partitions: disks are much slower
> > when reading from internal partitions than from external ones.  
> 
> What is an internal partition, and what is an external partition?
> 

Internal: the ones who are on tracks close to the center of the disk.
The lowest the number of track, the closer to the edge.  These
tracks contain more sectors than the internal ones.  Since the disk
rotates at constant speed, transfer rates are higher for the larger
external tracks than for the smaller ones.  Another benefit of the
larger external tracks is that the disk head doesn't need to be moved as
frequently than on the small internal ones. 

> Do you mean primary vs extended in DOS-speak? Is there really a difference?
> Should there be one?
> 

No.  I don't think extended versus primary makes a difference.  When
the system boots it will check for the beginning of partitions, this
is a bit longer and more complex for extended partitions but it
only affects boot time.  After that there is no difference: system
calculates the sector accessed respective to the beginning of
partition

> mark
-- 
Jean Francois Martinez <jfm512 at free.fr>