The last three suggestions in this area will help you to improve the performance of your hard drive. In reading or writing information to your hard drive, the single slowest operation is moving the read/write arm to the track on your hard drive that contains the data you are working with. By minimizing the distance that this read/write arm must move, you can improve the performance of your hard drive.
The first recommendations is to keep all of your active partitions together near the front of your hard drive and to place any seldom used partitions at the end of the hard drive. In this example, you’ll see that the active APPS and DATA partitions are at opposite ends of the hard drive with a less used BKUP partition between them. When you run an application, you read it from your APPS partition and then to work on the data file for that application you read it from the DATA partition. The read/write arm must continually travel over the less used BKUP partition.
Notice, by placing the APPS and DATA partitions near the beginning of the drive and putting the BKUP partition near the end of the drive, the distance the read/write head must travel is reduced, thus improving drive performance.