A 3-way set-up = nice, like my hitachi's
So in reality, formatting only a small partition on the drive (the inner part of the platter) improving the performance by choosing the fastest spinning sectors and using 128kb stripes.
Good thinking batman, is 20GB the optimum? assuming 160GB capacity and two 80gb platters, I would of thought that 30-40 GB would offer similar performance.
I ask these things as I know you are very thorough in your quest to optimise each part of a benchmarking system.
(sound of feet hitting the ground as Mav runs to find platter size of his deskstar 7k250 drives)