It may help performance to put the database on a different drive than your swap file (usually it resides on c). Also, not all disks are created equal so if one of them has a bigger buffer or spins faster, that will help performance too
Disk access is usually ~35% faster at the start of a hard drive than it is at the end. Hard drives read from the outside of a disc to the inside, but as the outer rings rotate same speed as inner rings, but have greater circumference, they therefore yield more data per rotation, hence a better transfer speed and access times!
The start of the harddrive's capacity (sector 0) is located on the outer ring of the platter discs, so you can use C for the fastest performance, and the last partition as large data partition storing bulk data where its mostly accessed sequentially and speed is of lesser concern.
if he knew which partition was written around the start of the platter[s] then obv. it's going to be a bit faster
(no offence meant by the following) someone who's asking such a basic question is hardly going to know where to start about finding out about any of that but technically yes it can/does make a diff.
