before we go further with this discuussion...let's point out, the differances we're talking aobut here are absolutely unnoticeable, the hardware today pretty much makes these points moot as far as any noticeable differance in performance on the consumer level.
nevertheless, ms has done the research;...
from
this we get the following paragraph...
"In Windows 2000 and earlier versions of Windows NT, the MFT was typically placed at the start of the disk space available to the file system. In Windows XP, the NTFS format utilities place the MFT 3 GB further into the disk space, which has been found to improve system performance by 5 to 10 percent."
here's what's going on...
The total time to complete a disk IO consists of the arm movement time, the rotational delay, and the actual transfer.
pagefile reads and writes are usually very short (64Kbytes) ... the actual transfer time is about a millisecond at 66 Mbyte/sec, or two msec at 33 MByte/sec.
Average rotational delay on a 7200 rpm drive is 4.2 msec...average seek time on a consumer HD is around 9 msec.
See... The actual burst transfer rate is not the important factor.
So if you want to make those IOs go faster, the most important thing to work on is the access time, that getsshorter if the arms fewer cylinders to cross.
You've will cut the average access time from anywhere else on the disk to lets say the pagefile just about in half. Now, you are correct, you've increased the actual data transfer part of the IO time by let's say 30% as compared to having it the file on the outside, BUT...it's more than made up for by the improved access time. sort of like 1 step back, three ste[s forward...a net win
BUT NOT SO ANYONE WOULD EVER NOTICE THIS DIFFERANCE, SO DON'T SWEAT IT