Is having the 'swap' partition at the 'beginning' better than at the 'end'?

Solution 1:

Forget swords and balls on string. Think of a stack of CD platters and then you will have in mind an image closer to what a hard drive is actually like.

Wikipedia on hard disks

Think also of the amount of Memory in the computer and ask, how often does the swap partition get used? Your question could be irrelevant. Disks do not have a beginning or an end. They have outer edges and inner edges. Data is placed across more than one platter. Seek times and access times, as well as spin speeds, would turn any answer into a debate.

Note this point from the Wikipedia article under HDD Formatting

Modern HDDs ... appear at their interfaces as a contiguous set of logical blocks; typically 512 bytes long

It only appears that has a beginning and an end. If performance is a concern then more RAM will have a greater effect than the placement of the swap partition.

Solution 2:

You should use RAM, not SWAP, because swap is terrible slow, compared to RAM. You can use RAM for the sleep mode.

The speed to access the first or the last sector on disk, when the head comes from the sleep position is so small (6–20 ms), that it doesn't affect your experience.

If you have many read/write cycles from swap, so that microscopic intervals could sum up to a mentionable fraction of a second, you would have continuous reading from swap - not repeated movements from a sleep position, so this could only be an argument, if there are more bits read from the outer sectors, than from the inner ones.

But do you know whether the first block is on the outer or on the inner side, and where the head is in sleep position?

And are you sure, that more information is put on the outer sectors? Maybe the bits there are at the proportion wider, as the disks rotates faster, so that you have a constant number of bytes in each sector. At least the diagram of wikipedia (DE) suggests so.

But - modern drives have a controller, which presents himself to the outer world as a virtual hard drive, and manages it's internals on his own, so every model could handle its geometry differently.

If you really depend on performance, you should go for more RAM, more RAM, more RAM. If you can't get more RAM for your machine, you should consider buying a faster hard drive, instead of guessing with it's geometry.

Solution 3:

You can measure the speed of different areas of the hard drive with System > Administration > Disk Utility (palimpsest from command line): pick your hard drive from the list and click on Benchmark. For swap use the read-write test results will be more salient, but please note that the test erases data. The resulting graph should give you an idea of the internal performance differences your drive has.