Various pre-install queries from potential user

[Rob Weir]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 09:30:07AM -0500, Martin Maney said
> On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 12:35:48PM +0800, John wrote:
> > Making lots a partitions like that ensures there's lotsa nothing between 
> > useful somethings and so increases seek distances, impairs performance.
> 
> Are you sure?  It may depend on the filesystem, but if I remember
> correctly one of the things that ext2 has long done to try to avoid
> fragmentation is to intentionally disperse files across the multiple
> groups of blocks it divides the partition into internally.  It seems

If you have multiple partitions, and need to access data from all of
them, your disk will have to seek between their physical locations on
the platter.  If it's all one partition, then ext2 or whatever can try
to group data.

-rob

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