Swap on separate drive

letsrock · n00b Joined: 05 May 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Peyton CO

Ciao All! I'm finally going to take the plunge and try out Gentoo directly on my main machine instead of running it through VMWare. I've looked for an answer to my question in the forums and either I missed it or it's not there. As a long time Windows user, I know you can get a performance boost by placing it's pagefile on a separate drive. Is there a similar boost by placing the swap partition on another drive? Here is how I want to set things up:

HDA1 = Windows
HDA2 = SWAP (512Meg)
HDB1 = Gentoo
HDB2 = FAT32 (for file sharing between the two systems)

Thanks in advance!

Letsrock sends. . .<eom>
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Mark Clegg · Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 7:31 pm Post subject:

The simple answer to this question is probably yes, but it all depends on how much swapping your system is going to do. If it's swapping a lot, then a separate spindle will help, but nowhere near as much as more memory.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri May 05, 2006 8:03 pm Post subject:

letsrock,

There are no constraints in linux about how your filesystem is made up.
The actual phyisical split over drives (or even machines) is hidden by the kernel.

Diskless installs are common with the 'local' filesystem being somewhere on the network.

If you are going to do much swapping, a seperate spindle is much faster as you don't incur (as much) head movement time to read and write swap.
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troymc · Guru Joined: 22 Mar 2006 Posts: 553

Actually, if those drives are the same speed (7200rpm, 6msec seek - whatever) the best way would be to setup 2 small swap spaces, one on each drive and tell your system to use them both.

Philbert · Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 5:36 am Post subject:

If your using IDE drives (your post mentions hda and hdb, so I'm assuming you are), then you should put your swap onto the other drive and make it the master of the 2nd IDE channel (make the drives /dev/hda and /dev/hdc, rather than a master/slave combo).

That's assuming you have 2 IDE channels.

IMHO, you'd be far better off throwing more memory at the machine than squeezing the smallest amount of extra performance with your swap space.

Mark Clegg · Posted: Sat May 06, 2006 10:06 am Post subject:

This is true, provided that you're not sharing the IDE channel with a slower device, such as a CD-ROM. - In a primary/secondary configuration, both devices run at the speed of the slowest, so if you have 2 IDE channels and want to put 2 fast hard disks and a slow CD-ROM on them, you're better off putting the hard disks as primary/secondary on the first channel, and the CD-ROM as primary (and only device) on the second.

letsrock · n00b Joined: 05 May 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Peyton CO

Thank you all for your advice and knowledge. I have the two hard drives in question on the first IDE channel (IDE 0?) and two DVD burners on the second IDE channel (IDE 1?). I have an older Gateway E-4650 which uses RDRAM and I although I have 512Meg RAM, I don't have the money to upgrade to 1GB anytime soon. So I'll be trying out what troymc suggested tonight or tomorrow and I'll post how it goes. Thanks again!

Letsrock sends. . .<eom>
_________________
Knowledge is power. . .
Sharing knowledge is Powerful! - Unknown