windows as first partition?

[buddyglass]

I'm considering purchasing a black previous-generation MacBook and would like to dual-boot Windows XP and Leopard. Since I expect to spend most of my time in XP, I would like to have the NTFS partition be the first one on the drive, in order to get the best performance.

From what I've read on the diskutil man page it's pretty trivial to set up the partitions this way. So what I'm curious about are the following:

1. Can Leopard boot from a partition that isn't the first one on the drive?

2. Supposing I have Leopard and XP install disks, how would I go about achieving this?

I understand the process of installing OS X, then using Boot Camp to shrink the HFS+ partition, create a NTFS one, and install Windows. But that would result in the HFS+ partition being the first one. In order to use diskutil I have to have OS X installed, but if I use it in the manner I need to then it will result in me destroying my OS X installation.

Can one run diskutil from the Leopard install media, in order to partition the drive manually before installing OS X for the first time?

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Hmmm... I remember from OS class that the outer partitions were the "fastest" partitions (due to their higher angular velocity, and as such, more bits pass under the read head than do bits closer to the center of the disk), so if you want the most performance from your Windows XP partition, logic dictates that it should be a partition at the highest end of the spectrum (hence, a higher partition number, since partition are made from the inside-out), no?

CD and DVD recordable disks are burned from the inside-out (from the center ring toward the edge), which is the same as hard disks, if I remember correctly... and, if you've burned many CDs or DVDs before, you know that when you use variable speed recording, the burning starts off slow (center burning) and burns faster as you write more data to the CD (outer burning).

All in all, though, I don't think you're going to get any perceivable performance increase from putting Windows XP on one partition or another -- I think those kind of performance number increases would only show up in benchmarking, and, even then, I think they'd be negligible. Put it this way: if someone plopped down two MacBooks in front of you -- one with Windows on the inner-most partition, and one on the outer-most partition, do you think you could perceive any performance increase in one over another just by using the computers without knowing which one is which?

 

[buddyglass]

I agree the performance increase won't be huge. But if I'm going to spend most of my time in one OS vs. the other, then I figure I might as well maximize the performance of the one I'm going to use most.

As for inner vs. outer: yes, the outer one is supposed to provide a higher transfer rate. I was under the impression that the partitions were created from the outside in, though. I'll do some more research on that.

Worst case I could just conduct an experiment. Create three HFS+ partitions: a 1G one, followed by a (max - 2G) one, followed by a 1G one. Then install OS X on the middle one, and benchmark the transfer rate on the other two.