[plug] Disk Partitioning & Dial on Demand questions

[Bret Busby]

Christian Payne wrote:
> 
> Bret Busby wrote:
> >
> > Chris Griffin wrote:
> > >
> > > I have a system at home that I am setting up for a friend that posses some
> > > interesting questions, well for me anyway, and would appreciate some
> > > help/advice.
> > >
> > > The system has two drives in it. The first is a 4GB of which I can have
> > > 1Gig for the system, the rest is for user data area. With all of the system
> > > and facilities I had to install, it left me with that partition 93% full.
> > > For this reason I fitted an old 240MB drive as a secondary and would like
> > > to add this into the system. This raises two questions for me.
> > > First, should I just move /var onto this drive or should I move other areas
> > > onto it as well.
> > > Secondly, how do I move it over without having to reinstall the system?
> > >
> 
> > However, I believe that it has been mentioned on the list, in the past, that it
> > could be a good idea, to have the swap partition on a separate physical drive,
> > as this could cause parallel disk access, which would increase performance,
> > provided the physical drive on which the swap partition resides, is not too much
> > slower than the primary hard disk. The 240MB HDD, because of its size, and
> > therefore its age, may not increase performance, and may instead reduce
> > performance, but, having the swap partition on that drive could be useful, apart
> > from performance.
> 
> This isn't a bad idea -- assuming you would ever need 240MB of swap
> which I suspect would be unlikely unless you have A LOT of physical RAM
> (>=256MB IMO).  Otherwise you could possibly stick /var on it or even
> the root filesystem (the disadvantage here being that if it's an old
> disk and it fails, things are messy).
>

Sorry, I didn't make it clear. I didn't mean for the whole 240MB to be used as
swap. I have about 64MB swap partition, and I don't remember seeing it used more
than about 20% of capacity, from using top.

The intention, was to locate the swap partition on a secondary physical drive,
rather than using the full capacity of the secondary physcal drive.

-- 

Bret Busby
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