I want to create a partition in my hard drive to install Linux to dual boot with Windows 7, in my laptop. What I am not sure is where in the unallocated area of my HDD, that I should create that partition.

I have heard that, if partitions are created in such a way, as to make the Actuator Arm to move over too wide a range (area), back and forth across the HDD unnecessarily, while the computer is being used, it would cause more wear and tear and LOWER the life span of the HDD.

The attachment below SHOWS my HDD. As you can see I have over 200GB of unallocated space. I want to partition about 100GB for Linux. Should I make the Linux partition at the end of the unallocated space that I have marked as X, which would LEAVE some unallocated space after that. Or is it better to make it at the other end Z, which would leave some unallocated space before the Linux partition. If there are any better suggestions than X or Y, they are most welcome. The important thing for me is the efficient functioning of the computer and the avoidance of unnecessary wear and tear of my HDD, as mentioned above. I also want to keep Linux and Windows completely separate without any sharing of files or folders.

Thank you

[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]Hello,
Welcome to the forum if this is your first time.here you'll find a number of people who can give you good advice about what you're doing.
First things first. You must have a backup plan already in place before you tried changing partitions on your hard drive. Although Windows is fairly reliable, mistakes do happen. Sometimes it's the software, sometimes it's the hardware. But it happens.
Now about hard drive efficiency. This tends to be more of a concern for people that are running commercial servers and want to get the highest performance out of some older equipment. But that does not really apply to you. A small increase in performance would not give you a noticeable benefit. But in a commercial amplification that could make a difference in revenue flow.
Just go ahead and use Windows 7 to change the size of your hard drive. Did you say 100 GB? That is more than PLENTY for either Linux or Windows.
Once you have the space freed up on your hard drive, just go ahead and install Linux and tell Linux to use the free space on the drive. The Linux boot manager will do whatever is needed to be compatible with the Windows 7 boot system. If you're using a recent version of Linux, there shouldn't be any problem.
As mentioned earlier, the use of a backup is necessary. Without more details it's hard to know exactly what sort of problems you might come up against. But in most cases, installing Linux on a Windows system is not really a hard thing to do. You should not notice any difference in hard drive efficiency or performance. Normally Windows takes care of them efficiency problems and performance problems and from time to time will update the indexes on the Windows system.
I hope this is of some help you.
You can short stroke a drive to get sightly better performance but the gain really isnt that much. A SSD can be picked up inexpensively to be far better than a HDD for performance.

You can defrag the drive to get data grouped better and avoid excessive arm sweep as well.

I short stroked an old 164.7GB Hard Drive and only saw a 2.85% gain in performance with hard drive benchmark test from before when set up as a single 164.7GB partition to now a 40GB and 124.7 GB split. The gain in performance is not noticeable without a benchmark to show.

I have been told that the smaller the initial partition created, the better the results with short stroking, but i dont bother with that anymore ever since SSD's became available. And if I need faster performance than a SSD I will use a RAMdrive and allocate a section of system RAM to act like hard drive space. With part of your total memory count acting as a drive space information can be accessed greater than 10x faster than that of a SSD.Thank you Geek-9pm and DaveLembke, for your replies. I have installed Linux and it is working fine.

Regards