Re: New HD advice
Mike wrote:
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.
Not so in 2.6.
This doesn't address this particular issue, but it does explain why it
might be so:
http://www.osdl.org/docs/linux_journaling_filesystems_and_workloads.pdf
I found it looking for a comparison of filesystems; that's about page 28.
Ideally, you would always want swap as a partition.
I do not believe that is so on single-drive systems. Consider the amount
of time seeking between data and swap paritions, I can't see how any
optimisations can overcome the laws of physics.
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.
NO NO NO.
best place for swap, least-used drive.
Best parition - busiest.
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.
You'd be surprised.
_I_'d guess /usr isn't used all that much, and /home gets thrashed.
I was really amazed on OS/2 some years ago when I put swap on my data drive. The system just about died.
--
Cheers
John
-- spambait
1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au Z1aaaaaaa@computerdatasafe.com.au
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