On 10/14/2015 06:13 AM, Xen wrote:
But still, I wouldn't want my entire /home or even my local /home/user to be on a different device.
Once again history and experience trumps your view of things! Having separate 'spindles' for different parts of the storage offers a good degree of parallelism for a number of reasons. Drives tend to be smart devices, they have their own buffers and caches and can work fairly autonomously. Even the old PDP disk controllers that used a single DMA channel into memory could set up seek and buffer operations of more than one disk simultaneously. Now we have SATA as the basic drive interface, and each SATA channel is independent. They can work autonomously. Depending on your hardware they *may* be able to carry out transfers either in parallel or interleaved. Yes, having huge drives means that most people using PCs for desktop think it simpler to have one drive; many don't even partition that. Certainly Windows did not have a heritage of putting user data on a different spindle or partition! Certainly back in the PDP/11 days, having a separate spindle for Swap speeded up the roll-in/roll-out. And having a separate spindle for /tmp speeded up many operations, since memory limitations meant that in-core caching of intermediate files and sort buffers wasn't practical. While some of that is not an issue with today's virtual memory and larger internal memory, it does raise issues of where the best position for expensive fast store such as SSD should be. As ever, there is a trade-off between memory and its speed/cost and 'external' storage and its speed/cost. Separating code and data has always been a good principle. That is one reason we have a separate /home branch at all. Having it as a separate partition can make upgrades and backups simpler as well. Having it as a separate 'spindle' (aka 'drive' aka 'device') also offers a degree of parallels - efficiency and performance - as well as maintainability. This has long been demonstrated. There are many variations of this which manifest as the forms of RAID. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org