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

[Brandon N]

--- Matt Gushee <mgushee at hypermall.net> wrote:
> 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.

The performance will be better if both disks are on the different
controllers. 
Put well used partitions on both disks so that they don't spin down
while the system is actively in use.  Then put swap on both disks (it's
slightly faster to make it the first partition on the disk, but I don't
think we are talking about much of an improvement).  If I remember
correctly, swap will automatically strip between the two disks.

Brandon

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