Bernhard Auzinger <e0026053 student.tuwien.ac.at>
posted
200707201641.30655.e0026053student.tuwien.ac.at,
excerpted below, on
Fri, 20 Jul 2007 16:41:30 +0200:
> as I have four hdd's in my computer, I was wondering if
it does make
> sense to source out some partitions/directories to a
second hdd.
>
> At the moment I have separate partitions for /var, /tmp
and /usr/portage
> (I feel portage is a lot faster since I've done this)
on the same hdd.
>
> My question is if it makes sence to move these
partitions to another
> harddisk?
With four hard drives, particularly if they are near the
same size (not
an old 8 gig on the one end, and a new half terabyte on the
other, with
two in the middle), your best performance is likely to be in
RAID. Here,
I have four drives in RAID, using the kernel's own md RAID
drivers, with
RAID-1 for /boot, RAID-6 for my main system, and RAID-0 for
stuff like
/usr/portage, /usr/src, my ccache dir, and /tmp (altho with
8 gig memory,
I actually have /tmp on a memory based tmpfs). Swap is also
setup as
effectively RAID-0.
Note that RAID using both master and slave on IDE/PATA isn't
all that
efficient, however. Here, my hard drives are all SATA, tho
I'm still
using PATA CD/DVD drives (but only one on each channel
master, not master
and slave). Of course, SCSI is its own discussion.
If your drives are different size but all say 80 gig or
better, you could
still do a RAID-0 for speed and put /tmp, swap and the like
on that (you
don't want to put anything important on RAID-0, since if one
drives dies,
you lose everything on the RAID-0, but it's fast, so is good
for temp
stuff like swap and /tmp, and stuff you can download off the
net again
easily if necessary, like the gentoo/portage tree),
especially if the
drives aren't installed as IDE/PATA both master and slave.
If one or
more of the drives are older and below about 80 gig, chances
are it's
slow enough it'd be bottlenecking the others anyway, so
don't bother.
Alternatively, you want to make sure as much as possible,
that stuff
accessed at the same time is on different disks. Generally,
that's the
same stuff as the candidates for RAID-0 above, swap, /tmp
(and /var/tmp),
ccache, and the gentoo/portage tree, particularly if you
tend to do
emerges in the background while continuing to work on other
stuff. The
caveat for swap is that the newer and therefore larger
drives tend to be
faster, and it's them that generally have the main system on
them already
(unless you have your largest drive as a dedicated media
drive as some
people do). It's often most convenient to try swap on the
old/slow
drive, but of course, that can be counter-productive.
Still, it
depends. It may still be faster on it, than having the
new/fast drive
trying to handle both system and swap at the same time, even
if the swap
drive /is/ your old/slow one.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."
Richard Stallman
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