The next suggest to improve the performance of your hard drive is to keep your partition large enough to contain your files, but small enough so that you don’t have a large distance to move the read/write arm over an empty portion of the partition.
In this example, we have the APPS and DATA partitions next to each other near the beginning of the hard drive, but we have make the partition size much larger that is needed. Thus we end up moving the read/write arm over a lot of empty space in the APPS partition in order to access the DATA partition.
By reducing the size of these two partitions to have only about 30% empty space in them, we can reduce the distance the read/write head must move to go between the two partitions. Put the extra space in the seldom used BKUP partition at the end of the hard drive where it will not slow down the performance of your drive. We can always adjust their size later if we need some more room in the partitions.