Bill's final advice regarding locating files on the outer rims of the discs is
exactly the same advice that I was about to give:

> The bottom line is that, while there may be a (slight-to-small) performance
>  advantage, usually the operational issues make it not very worthwhile.

There are other, far more better ways to improve disc access speeds that will
provide truly significant performance boosts (possibly by hundreds of times),
the best of all being: minimize your disc accesses to begin with, especially
for retrieval-only processes, such as report generation. Get the necessary
data off of the disc as directly and as quickly as you can, keep it in memory
as long as you can by touching it often (nothing more complicated than that is
necessary), and make your discs go silent, if at all possible. The fastest
form of disc access, by far and away, is no access at all.

Wirt Atmar