A fun obfuscation is that the "first" partition normally is on the outer-most of the drive.
If you slice a pizza into 6 slices, getting from slice 1 to 2 is "quicker" from closer to the center, since there the radius is less than at the outside nearer to the crust. This is how many people think of drives - this is what I'll call "a"
However, if you have equally-sized areas on the whole thing - meaning the outers are no larger than the inners - and the whole thing is spinning - then the outers are spinning faster than those on the inside (sitting on the outer edge of a carousel vs towards the center). This is what I'll call "b"
There's also more data available per cylinder without having to move heads on the outer tracks.
My wonderful paint example is attached....
My opinion: "man tuning" is correct, and while arch is correct about "Sectors at the beginning of the drive are faster than those at the end." (since the beginning of the drive is the outside of the drive) they should have left out the part about "(closer to the center of the disk)"