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I know that partitioning a conventional HDD drive will make it faster. Is the same true for Solid state drives? Does partitioning a solid state drive make it faster?

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    Why do you think partitioning a drive will make it "faster"? I think your premise is incorrect. On spinning drives it can potentially make head seeks quicker since it has less distance to travel, but that is so minute in modern it is hardly noticeable except in benchmarks, but there is no head to move in an SSD drive. This was sometimes noticeable in older drives where storage was measured in megabytes, but modern drives it is rarely noticeable unless you are splitting it up into many parts.
    – acejavelin
    Jun 24, 2018 at 0:14
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    @acejavelin - actually short stroking a drive can provide sustantial improvements in real performance - a 30% increase in sequential read speed is quite conservative.
    – davidgo
    Jun 24, 2018 at 0:26
  • @davidgo Hard drive tweaks like “short stroking” in 2018 are “truthy” efforts at best. You might make some slight speed improvements, but I doubt you would notice. And a 30% improvement over what and for what benefit? Jun 24, 2018 at 0:36
  • @jakegould I think you underestimate short stroking. Do a bit copy of a drive using software that shows the current transfer rates and you will see this speed increasing to about double it's initial speed - so 30% over average drive speed if using whole drive - That SSDs change the viability of short stroking does not diminish this affect. One use could be working with large videos.
    – davidgo
    Jun 24, 2018 at 0:43
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    @jakegould Agreed. In most cases SSD (even if used as caching) outperforms short stroking in most cases $/performance metric.
    – davidgo
    Jun 24, 2018 at 0:57

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I think there are a few logic errors here.

On an SSD drive, partitioning the drive will not make it faster, as it takes an equal amount of time to read any part of it - the data does not need to spin under the head. Further, it will move underlying blocks around, so a partition will not actually represent a contiguous block of cells.

On a hard drive, partitioning the drive won't make it faster per se - what it will do is allow you to modify the performance characteristics of the drive by limiting where tracks can be written to disk - Writing to the outer edge of the drive is about twice as fast as reading the innermost tracks. This is called "short stroking" a drive.

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