FW: [techtalk] Installing Linux on a second hard drive.

[Jeramia Ory]

> I must confess, I am a bit confused about why swap partitons on opposite
> drives would boost performance.

    Caveat: this is all how I understand it, and could be completely bogus,
and would welcome someone correcting me on anything I have wrong.

    One cause of a performance hit is when you swap memory in and out of the
partition.  In a single drive system, even thought the swap is on a separate
partition, it can't access two partitions on the same drive at the same
time, so you lose performance while the drive alternates the memory swapping
process and the other disk i/o processes.  With the swap on a seperate
channel, the system can now do memory swapping concurrently with the other
processes, thereby speeding up i/o.  I've found system "snappiness"
correlates well with how well the i/o is tuned.  FMMV.

> And I shouldn't have any LILO issues if they are each a master, correct?

    You shouldn't have LILO issues regardless of master/slave status, as
long as you install LILO into the mbr of the primary master.

Ta,
Jeramia