[CLUE-Tech] fstab, directories, and 2 Hard drives on one system

[Matt Gushee]

Kevin Cullis writes:

 > Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could best utilize 2 HD on
 > my system?

Interesting question. When I installed a second hard drive a few
months ago, I thought I'd follow a suggestion I remembered reading
some time before: put the swap space on a different drive from heavily
used running partitions (/usr, /var, etc). The theory is that that can
improve your performance by reducing clashes between swap access and
normal file I/O.

Well, it made perfect sense to me until I tried it. It turns out that
in my case putting swap on a lightly used drive actually worsened
performance -- because that drive spins down and needs to be "waked
up" when the system starts swapping. So I now think it depends on your
disk usage patterns.

Another idea -- and this is just guesswork; there are probably people
here who can give you relevant facts and figures: if you frequently
multitask, consider whether the different activities you do are
associated with particular areas of the disk, and allocate space
accordingly. For example, if you often compile C programs and write
documents at the same time, that might suggest putting /usr/src (or
/usr/local/src) and /home on separate drives.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO USA