On 2014-02-28 07:26, Fraser Bell wrote:
> And, indeed, on a low-resource machine, the swap tends to be used
> frequently and the first partition is the fastest (in the old days,
> defragging HDs, you would place the most-frequently-used modules at the
> front of the drive to increase performance).
Yes, but that had a different reason 
In FAT partitions placing first directories, then often used files
worked faster because for reading a file you need first to locate the
directory entry, then read the FAT table entries. As the FAT is
mandatory at the start of the disk, the tendency was also to place
directory entries nearby, so at the start of the disk.
Then much used files were placed early because they were close to those
directory lists.
Another combination was to place the directory metadata close to the
directory contents (files).
The basic idea was to minimize disk head movement, between all those
operations, not because I/O throughput was faster at the rim of the disk
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)