Re: Faster swap by using separate disk?
Mark Phillips <mark@ist.flinders.edu.au> writes:
> I have been wondering about whether putting a swap partition on one IDE
> drive, while putting most of linux on a different IDE drive will speed up
> swap by allowing both disks to be accessed at the same time.
>
> Unfortunately I think I read somewhere that when you have a Master/Slave
> IDE pair, only one of the disks can be accessed at any one time, so that
> having the swap partition on a separate disk doesn't help.
>
> However my motherboard is capable of using 4 ide devices. It has two
> pairs:
>
> Primary Master/Primary Slave
> and
> Secondary Master/Secondary Slave
>
> What if I put linux on one of the primary disks, and the swap partition on
> a secondary disk, will that mean both disks can be accessed at the same
> time, hence giving a swap speedup?
Yes. If you put one disk on each ide channel/adapter/whatever and if
you put swap partitions on each drive, you will get a speedup as the
kernel is able to use both partitions concurrently (up to a point).
You can get even a greater speedup, if you use RAID0 (See package
mdutils). Startup of emacs is ~5-10 secs faster on my system, since I
converted my /usr partition (using cp -a).
Jens
---
Jens.Ritter@weh.rwth-aachen.de grimaldi@debian.org
Key ID: 2048/E451C639 Jens Ritter
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