The 03.10.10 at 09:40, H du Plooy wrote:
In 2a) my question is: I have identified the two partitions that would be used most heavily - /var and swap. Should I put these both on the faster drive, or on seperate drives. After reading your reply (the part about /usr and /opt, I think those two on different drives would be better.
Both together on a diferent disk than the rest of the system, I think, and probably on the faster disk, if that is where most of your write operations will be.
By the way, your idea for /usr and /opt is pretty good - I'll definitely keep that in mind!
Thanks, but it is not mine: I read it on the SuSE manual years ago :-) Ah, by the way: it is possible to have /usr on a separate partition, but I found that sometimes -- when init sequence detects errors on the disk and doesn't mount anything but "/" -- that some programs fail to run. If those programs include things like fsck, you are hoosed and need the rescue CD. This happened to me. Just to clarify, I meant having '/opt' in a partition on a diferent HD than the partition where directory '/usr' resides (on its own, or as part of '/usr').
Of course, it seems that raid 0 would be faster for everything, but at the same time, it needs some processing time overhead, and it is more vulnerable. Vulnerability is not really a worry, there won't be anything on that's perticularly valuable or irreplaceable. Just the time lost having to re-install, but that I do in an evening. No big deal.
Have a good backup, or an image.
Processing power is another thing, but having done software raid on a P-I 133 with the same class disc, I'm not too worried. The overhead there certainly didn't present any problems, so it shouldn't on this one.
Thanks for the replies...
Welcome! -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson