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

[Kelly Lynn Martin]

On Mon, 17 Apr 2000 14:57:32 -0500, Jeramia Ory <ory at cosine.wustl.edu> said:

>    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.

You also have issues with sending the poor little cylinder head
all over the drive.  Ideally, you'd have your swap partition on a
drive all by itself (which is impractical because nobody needs that
much swap) or on a drive with infrequently accessed data; then the
head on the swap drive will be always be near the swap data.  It's
also a good idea to put your swap partitions near the center of the
disk.

My system has /, /tmp, /usr/lib and swap on hda, and everything else
(including a secondary swap) on hdc.  hdd is a CD-ROM; there is
nothing on hdb.  This is not ideal, but I'm constrained by relatively
limited disk space (roughly 6GB).

Understanding the I/O subsystem of your computer is critical to
optimizing its operation. :)

Kelly