Re: New HD advice
David Baron wrote:
Thanks for all the good advice (obviously I am considering moving stuff to a
new drive). A few more questions:
1. (Might be elementary, not matter, but ) what is best, place files on
partition and mount to the target directory or directory(ies!!) on the
partition and mount to the parent directory?
2. I have smart monitor running. Got no bulletins from it--might need to
configure it differently. The old drive has less smart-capability than the
new--temperature being very important!
3. /home, /var ... others ( /local, /usr/src)? SIze recommendations? I recall
seeing very detailed recommendations somewhere a few months back.
4. Swap file vs swap partition--I did not know there was such an alternative
in linux. IF a file is better, how do I change over? (Swap is almost never
used, it seems.)
A word about swap space.
Although you can create swap space as a file, instead of the kernel
handling a raw partition to swap, all swapping must go through the file
system, which slows swapping considerably. Ideally, you would always
want swap as a partition.
With that said, if you have 2 disks, it's important to have them both
installed as IDE primaries, never having two disks on the same IDE
channel as primary and secondary. The idea is that your system can
read/write to the two primaries at the same time, whereas with a primary
and secondary setup, the read/write must alternate between the primary
and secondary.
Now, if you have your two disks installed and IDE primaries, and you
create a swap partition on both disks, and both disks are set to the
same priority, say 1, then the net effect is that when swapping occurs,
data is written to both swap areas interleaved. This is the fastest way
of handling swap space.
With two disk set as IDE primaries, further speed gains can be had by
splitting your busiest partitions on the two different drives. As an
example, I would say that /usr and /var are probably the system's
busiest partitions. If the /usr partition is on /dev/hda and /var is on
/dev/hdc, you would probably see slightly better system performance.
FWIW -mk
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