Increasing hdd performance: Swap partition should be at the beginning of the hard disk drive

[Removed by request]

I'm using Ubuntu 11.10 dev (it was installed from the Ubuntu 11.04 alternate cd). At the installation process I have choosen a guided partition of my full hard disk drive. Ubuntu has created at first /dev/sda1 with 182,31 GB as /dev/sda1 and at the end the swap partition with 4 GB as /dev/sda2 -> /dev/sda5.

I'm wondering why the swap partition is created at the end of the hard disk drive. On mechanical disks there are heavy negative performance impacts at this place. Only the first ~20%-25% of a hard disk drive are the fastest place with a constant speed (in my case ~40 GB). It would make more sense to place the swap partition at the beginning of the hard disk drive at default on a guided partition.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Julian Taylor (jtaylor)]

You hardly every use swap on normal machines nowadays, and if you do 30% more throughput will hardly improve anything.
Its probably preferable to have the os and applications in the fast section to increase boot speed.

[Removed by request (removed3425744)]

This is true but the application- and system files will only slowdown if they are behind the 20%-25%. Even if this happens the slowdown will be only small because the files are moved only a little percentage to an inner disk position (where the relative position of the disk is still fast) and not to the end of the disk where they will be really slow.

[Daniel Swarbrick (pressureman)]

I think these claims need to be backed up by quantitative data. The relative position of a swap partition might have been an important factor 10 years ago on slow hard disks in computers with little RAM. However, with most modern PCs shipping with at least 4GB RAM and fast hard disks with 32MB on-disk cache, I doubt that the average user would notice the difference where the swap partition was located.