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If I create a partition at the end of the drive does that create the partition on the outside of the platter where the data is passing under the drive heads fastest?

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Most commonly a partition at the "end" of the disk is on the inner-most part of the platter, and will have the slowest transfer speed. Not all drives are guaranteed to work this way however.

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Ok the opposite of what I thought. – Matt Oct 22 '10 at 3:04
Also found this link helpful. snia.org/education/storage_networking_primer/stor_devices/… – Matt Oct 22 '10 at 3:26
It's also going to depend a lot on load and caching - if another program accesses the disk and the heads have to move then you wont get quite the expected result, or if the filesystem is fragmented, etc. If you're not tuning a high performance system then I'd be surprised if this made a noticable difference to anything in daily use, and if you are - have you considered RAID? – TessellatingHeckler Oct 22 '10 at 4:54
If he really notices any difference by putting files on the beginning/end of a disk, he should consider getting and SSD; they're much faster than disks. – Chris S♦ Oct 22 '10 at 13:44
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