Re: swap files
The bit about sequential throughput on a rust spinner dropping as the head gets closer to the center of the disk is real. One revolution of the platters takes the same time as it would if the active head was reading/writing at the outside of the disk, but with fewer sectors moving under the head in that time as the heads move inward. If you benchmark a drive's throughput from sector 0 all the way to the last, you will see that the sequential throughput is at its greatest at the start of the test and considerably lower by the time the end is reached.
That does not mean that having a swap file at the end will always slow things down. Workloads that consist of a lot of small reads or writes (especially if they are small enough to fit within the hardware or software caches) will depend more on seek time than sequential throughput potential.
That seems to be what Steve Graham was referring to above. If you put the swap partition close to where the heads will spend most of their time during normal operation, the time it takes the heads to move from one to the other track will be reduced.
Of course, it would be hard to justify using a rust spinner if any kind of performance is desired in 2022.
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