[sharris]

....
This has been the strangest thing to me for a very long time. I use to read that the beginning of a hard disk drive was the fastest section of the HDD and that the inner drive was the slowest because the arm has to work so much harder. I really don't see it that way but that's what the INTERNET say, including my old textbook.

Anyway, if this is true than why every time I always get these same results. I do this with Arch_Live CD or from an EXTENDED install of Arch living on partition-5... It takes care of my FreeBSD and PcBSD installs. I use it for doing backups and clean-ups. It maybe useless but it's a habit to zero-out each partition before giving it his OS back.


This is what I get every time (give or take a few sec/min):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 - - than sda2 - - than sda3

Partition-1 107 479 701 504 bytes | 100 GB - 4445 second | byte = 1 hour 15 minute
Partition-2 107 479 733 760 bytes | 100 GB - 1118 second | byte = 0 hour 18 minute
Partition-3 322 430 814 720 bytes | 300 GB - 3537 second | byte = 0 hour 59 minute


It takes over an hour on P1 to do the same job of the same size on P2. It only takes minutes on P2 ... Even P3 triple in size is fastest than P1 ... and this never fail on my Seagate 1000GB, and I have notice the same on other brands of HDD's in the pass. It drives me crazy.

There, I finally asked somebody.

Thanks in advance