RE: [TCLUG:1804] Reinstalling -- How should I partition?

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> Hello all:
>
> >
> > Your swap partition(s) should always be in the first partition, as it is
> > closest to the center of the disk and has the fastest response.
> >

	Personally, I'd say / and /usr should be in the fastest partition(s).  I
use swap very rarely (I have 64MB memory on this system) but / and /usr are
constantly in use.   Anyways, this sounds to me like the sort of thing that
made more sense when drive platters were 7-12 inches across...  I'd bet the
difference in access time between the first and fourth partitions on a drive
is of vanishing significance these days.


> 3.3 Where should I put my swap space?
> 	[snip!]
>      Summary: Put your swap on a fast disk with many heads that is not
>      busy doing other things. If you have multiple disks: Split swap and
>      scatter it over all your disks or even different controllers.
>

	I'd never heard that splitting up your swap partition would increase
performance.  Sounds like a good idea, although it probably would make more
sense on the four SCSI drives on the HP-UX K200 here than the two IDE drives
on my home Linux box...


>      Even better: Buy more RAM.
>
> At this point I'm sorely tempted to go buy one of those cheapo IDE
> drives and install it for nefarious swap and RAID purposes...

	There's sort of a catch-22 here, though.  An old cheap IDE drive that is
being used for swap only may still have a much lower access speed than a
relatively fast SCSI, even if the SCSI drive is being used for other things.
	Obviously, if you have the choice, stuffing the box full of memory chips is
your best bet.  With 64MB, you can expect minimal swapping even with X
running (in my experience... Of course, I don't run X from the console very
often).  With 128MB, you'll barely ever see any swapping at all.
	Hey, does anyone know if you can do RAID with a ramdisk?