This has been discussed before.... Please remember that you do NOT need to sacrifice the extra space to short stroke. Greggpb, this is short stroking....
An HDD uses CAV (Constant angular velocity), which means that the disk spins at the same speed (e.g. 10k RPM) regardless of the head position (unlike a CD which changes speed). Due to CAV the outside of the disk is moving faster, i.e. more sectors pass the head per revolution, thus increasing the amount of data that can be read/written per revolution, thus increasing throughput.
So, if you were to create a 100GB partition at the start (outside) of the disk (you could use Windows diskman or a third party tool), and use it for your OS and apps, then those files would be located at the fastest part of the disk, and performance would increase.
If you then created another partition with the rest of the space to store music and movies you would retain capacity, and improving performance of OS and app files. The idea is that if you are watching a movie, or accessing a “slow” part of the disk, then you will most likely not be doing something that requires fast disk IO, for the casual user that is.
