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On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Duaine Hechler <dahechler@att.net> wrote:
I am upgrading from 500GB to 1TB drives. The 500GB drives are 99% full.
After I do the initial upgrade, how is the data spread across the drive ?
Contiguous from front to back like Windows FS ? Or evenly spread (but contiguously) across the drive ?
Ultimately, I'm trying to figure out - is the front of the drive going to get the brunt of the work or is the data going to be scattered across the drive.
General layout: root (/) swap /home (rest of drive)
TIA, Duaine
Duaine, You know what's in partitions, so I assume you are asking how the data is stored inside the individual filesystems. You need to say what filesystem you're using, but for XFS as an example it is optimized for placement on RAID, therefore it spreads the data out as much as it can in hopes that the data ends up split across lots of spindles and therefor the parallel nature of raid gets full benefit. A filesystem optimized for a single drive will keep all the data closely packed in an effort to minimize disk seek time. Thus many linux desktop filesystems will keep data closely packed in an effort to reduce the distance the head has to move to go from one piece of data to the next. Also the outer edge of the drive spins at a faster inches / second rate, so filesystems use low numbered sectors in preference to high number sectors in hopes that the low numbered sectors will be closer to the outer edge. ie. if the RPMs are constant then a 1.5 inch radius circle has a linear speed 3x faster than a 0.5 inch radius circle. As to the "brunt" of the work, the disk head flies over the top of the platter, so there is in theory no wear and tear on the platter as data is read/written. It was an issue with 2005 era flash disk that did not wear-level, but with current generation rotating disks and SSDs there is no wear and tear advantage I know of to spreading the workload around the disk. Greg -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org