[gentoo-server] partition layout on desktop app server

[Rodrigo Garcia]

Hello fellow gentoo-server users!

    I'm planning an install of an application server, that is, a GUI 
application server via X11, as in Terminal Server. It will run desktop 
apps like OpenOffice, gnome, mozilla, gaim, lyx, evolution... I think 
the main performance bottleneck will be the hard-drives which, I 
believe, are the slowest devices on any system.
    What would you recomend for the layout of the different partitions? 
Are access times different on different parts of the drive? I recall 
reading that access times are faster at the beginning of the drive, but 
I also sort of remember that access times are optimum in the middle of 
the drive, as it's that zone where the heads are most likely to be in 
any given moment. In your experience: what parts of the filesystem are 
accessed more often? /usr? /home, perhaps? maybe /tmp? Is there a way to 
measure this?

Would there be performance benefits from placing this parts of the 
filesystem in a different order in the partition layout?

    And what filesystems do you recomend for the different partitions in 
a desktop-app-server scenario?

    Any comments are welcome!

       Thanks

          Rodrigo