[opensuse] adding hard drives and such
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive. Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive? I also want to copy my home drive to the new larger drive. Are there any issues I need to be aware of that could cause some problems with regard to data access and such? Dwain -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
If you are using swap enough to worry about the speed of the drive,
you have something wrong in my opinion.
Do a "vmstat 5" and watch the "so" column. If it is zero most of the
time you're not really using swap. i.e Nothing is being sent to swap.
If it is typically non-zero during normal system usage, you have a
problem (or some really big programs). Typically not enough RAM. In
that situation I personally would buy more ram, not try to figure out
how to make swap faster.
Greg
On 4/4/07, dwain
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive?
I also want to copy my home drive to the new larger drive. Are there any issues I need to be aware of that could cause some problems with regard to data access and such?
Dwain
-- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594
telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619
"The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression."
Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art"
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-- Greg Freemyer The Norcross Group Forensics for the 21st Century -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Greg Freemyer wrote:
If you are using swap enough to worry about the speed of the drive, you have something wrong in my opinion.
Do a "vmstat 5" and watch the "so" column. If it is zero most of the time you're not really using swap. i.e Nothing is being sent to swap.
If it is typically non-zero during normal system usage, you have a problem (or some really big programs). Typically not enough RAM. In that situation I personally would buy more ram, not try to figure out how to make swap faster.
Greg
When I currently look at the process tab in Ksysmon the swap is zero. I've got 768MB RAM in the system. It's old and a bit slow, but it runs opensuse and I have to say that I am thrilled to have it running, since the first time I tried to install it I couldn't get it to get up and go. I don't have a lot of money to build a new system right now and I'm just trying to keep this system running as long and as efficiently as I can for the time it has left. I don't do much serious work on it and I hope to start learning about programming and server management. Damn I really like this operating system! Beats the H E double hockey sticks out of Windows any day of the week! Cheers, Dwain -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
dwain wrote:
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Swap is typically 2x your RAM. I haven't seen a HD available that small for long time. Just provide a swap partition, typically 1-2 GB, but more if needed, on your root drive.
Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive?
Yes. Not sure what size drives you are talking about (why you are buying 2 but adding only a 3rd?), but the smallest you can buy at my local supplier now is 80 GB, way too much for swap.
I also want to copy my home drive to the new larger drive. Are there any issues I need to be aware of that could cause some problems with regard to data access and such?
No, you will find this a much more friendly activity in linux than you were used to in Windows. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 15:35, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
dwain wrote:
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Swap is typically 2x your RAM.
This is not a meaningful rule of thumb--it has nothing to do with anything real. If anything, having more physical RAM means you need less swap space to accommodate any given process mix. No matter how much RAM you have and no matter how much swap you configure, you'll hit a hard allocation limit (roughly RAM + Swap - Kernel), at which point programs' requests for more memory, attempts to fork a new process or attempts exec new programs will fail. So the real question is: How much virtual memory do you need during peak situations. Subtract from that the physical RAM size, add the fixed kernel memory requirements and that's how much swap you need. And, of course, any periods during which the working set (memory activately being accessed by running processes) exceeds physical memory (less kernel reserved memory) will be times during which thrashing results. When this happens, CPU utilization is low even though the load average is high and disk activity becomes nearly continuous and is dominated by paging traffic. Anything other than brief and transient occurrence of thrashing is usually intolerable.
...
-- Joe Morris
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 15:35, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
dwain wrote:
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Swap is typically 2x your RAM.
This is not a meaningful rule of thumb--it has nothing to do with anything real. If anything, having more physical RAM means you need less swap space to accommodate any given process mix.
I think you may be forgetting if he uses suspend to disk, it needs to fit the memory in his swap partition. Not necessarily 2x, but more than 1x. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 06:35 +0800, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
dwain wrote:
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Swap is typically 2x your RAM. I haven't seen a HD available that small for long time. Just provide a swap partition, typically 1-2 GB, but more if needed, on your root drive.
The 2x ram figure for swap was always very arbitrary, according to what I have read. In fact, these days with ram being comparatively cheap there is argument for reducing that swap ratio, or even having NO swap partition at all - especially if you are looking at >1GB of ram in your machine. Your partitioner will alert you when you try and configure a system like that, but I have setup a suse system with no swap when I had 2GB of ram and it ran just as stable as if I had a swap. After all, it would be ridiculous to slavishly follow that old ratio and for me to have allocated 4GB to swap in that system!
Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive?
If you must have swap, yes it would be best to have it on the first sectors of the root drive and leave the other drive spare for a different partition, say /var /usr /opt or /tmp. How you allocate things depends entirely on what size drives you have. Gavin -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Thursday 2007-04-05 at 08:36 +0800, Gavin Chester wrote:
The 2x ram figure for swap was always very arbitrary,
Yes. Actually, that figure was the ratio given for Windows (around 3.x) because that was the maximum it could handle. I have a machine around with a 20x ratio, Linux has no such limitation.
according to what I have read. In fact, these days with ram being comparatively cheap there is argument for reducing that swap ratio, or even having NO swap partition at all - especially if you are looking at >1GB of ram in your machine.
There is still a good reason to have more swap than ram: we need it to be able to suspend to disk. And suspending and recovering to/from disk is way faster than halting/booting.
Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive?
If you must have swap, yes it would be best to have it on the first sectors
There are always discussions about which is faster: some say the first sectors, some others the last sectors... best thing is to measure it, if speed is important. It varies. I have a disk that is faster at around 1/3 of its size. If swap speed is important (ie, swap is really going to be used) best strategy is probably to use several swaps in several disks with the same priority: the kernel will distribute usage evenly, dividing the load and multiplying the speed. But in that case, suspending will probably not work. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFGFFnqtTMYHG2NR9URAjdjAJ0QSitvda8G/17lKnzE0++JfceHnACfZ3IR q+C0hmMNrmgdFRsHQ76vvqE= =EsYB -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 17:36, Gavin Chester wrote:
...
If you must have swap, yes it would be best to have it on the first sectors of the root drive and leave the other drive spare for a different partition, ...
What is fastest is to have the swap closest to the space that is most used on the drive it shares. If there's a dedicated swap drive, then it doesn't matter, of course. If the swap partition or file is shared with a drive used for other purposes, then what constitutes optimum depends on the pattern of process-driven usage that is most likely to be experienced when swapping actually takes place. Only the user or administrator of the system in question posses the information required to optimized swap allocation and placement.
Gavin
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
dwain wrote:
I am planning on adding a third hard drive to my mix. I will be buying 2 new larger ones, one for root and one for home and i would like to use the third one as a swap drive.
Swap is typically 2x your RAM. I haven't seen a HD available that small for long time. Just provide a swap partition, typically 1-2 GB, but more if needed, on your root drive.
Would it be best not to use the third one as a swap drive and leave the swap drive on the root drive?
Yes. Not sure what size drives you are talking about (why you are buying 2 but adding only a 3rd?), but the smallest you can buy at my local supplier now is 80 GB, way too much for swap.
I am replacing a 13GB drive and a 4GB drive with 2 40GB 7200rpm drives. I had intended to use a 2GB drive that I have for the swap drive. The reason I'm using 40GB drives is that that's all the drive my BIOS on this old machine will handle. Besides, I don't need a larger drive than 40GB.
I also want to copy my home drive to the new larger drive. Are there any issues I need to be aware of that could cause some problems with regard to data access and such?
No, you will find this a much more friendly activity in linux than you were used to in Windows.
Glad to know this, I guess that a select all and move/copy to the new drive is all that is needed? -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Wednesday 2007-04-04 at 21:06 -0500, dwain wrote: ...
The reason I'm using 40GB drives is that that's all the drive my BIOS on this old machine will handle.
Fidlesticks! :-p I have an old 80386SX machine, which doesn't recognise any disk (you have to type the head, sector, track numbers into the bios setup), and which doesn't accept more than 512 MB, but linux happily uses an 8 GB disk on it. I believe the theoretical limit was 2 GB at the time, 512MB per partition, I think. I have also a pentium 1 machine, with an old bios, using also much larger disks than it was originally designed for. I forgot the numbers and I'm not going to power it up now, so I will not cite them. Ah! And my current machine also doesn't recognise my 160 GB nor my 320 GB hardisks - however, that's what Linux uses and boots from. Even Windows-Me works (provided I don't try to partition it in windows!) Who cares about the BIOS? This is Linux! :-P seriously, once Linux is running, most of those limitations do not exist, the bios is not used. You may have problems during booting, however. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFGFGcCtTMYHG2NR9URAg3IAJ0T/o0r/HNBWHEe9PH7O286D+C87wCeL0TM 66oVTz4zfAjp/lMgNLN9nzY= =O03F -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 21:06, dwain wrote: ...
I am replacing a 13GB drive and a 4GB drive with 2 40GB 7200rpm drives. I had intended to use a 2GB drive that I have for the swap drive.
The 2 GB is probably very slow comparing to 40 GB, so just don't use it.
The reason I'm using 40GB drives is that that's all the drive my BIOS on this old machine will handle. Besides, I don't need a larger drive than 40GB.
:-) Wait a while and you'll see. I have 2x80 and external 120 on this machine and it is not too much. Have you tried a bigger drive. BIOS is relevant only for the first moments of booting, and for placement of boot partition. ...
Glad to know this, I guess that a select all and move/copy to the new drive is all that is needed?
It should work like that if you install 40 GB as /dev/hdb, boot in live CD. If not than don't copy /proc and /sys, just create empty directories on target partition. I'm wondering what would do dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb if you use it from some Live CD like: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page and then just put 40 GB as /dev/hda. I haven't tried that, but it should make perfect copy of 13 GB disk. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 21:06, dwain wrote: ...
Have you tried a bigger drive. BIOS is relevant only for the first moments of booting, and for placement of boot partition.
Yes I have. Before I updated the BIOS I tried a 40GB drive and the machine didn't recognize the drive at all. Since updating the BIOS I know that the machine will read a 40GB drive. I have not tried anything larger, but if the board manufacturer is correct, 40GB is the limit with the BIOS update. -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 22:37, dwain wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 21:06, dwain wrote: ...
Have you tried a bigger drive. BIOS is relevant only for the first moments of booting, and for placement of boot partition.
Yes I have. Before I updated the BIOS I tried a 40GB drive and the machine didn't recognize the drive at all. Since updating the BIOS I know that the machine will read a 40GB drive. I have not tried anything larger, but if the board manufacturer is correct, 40GB is the limit with the BIOS update.
As Carlos mentioned there was the time that we had to type number of heads, cylinders and sectors, but linux worked. I can't say for sure, that it will work, as it can be some limitation in disk controller. I'm sure that even with the BIOS limitation to 1024 cylinders, which is long time obsolete, it was possible to use much larger drives than recognized by the BIOS. The only limitation was that kernel and initrd must be within first 1024 cylinders. That was usually assured by setting small boot partition in the begining of the drive, up to the 1023 cylinder (numbering is starting with 0 ). That is actually where separate boot partition has its purpose. -- Regards, Rajko. http://en.opensuse.org/Portal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 22:37, dwain wrote:
Rajko M. wrote:
On Wednesday 04 April 2007 21:06, dwain wrote: ...
Have you tried a bigger drive. BIOS is relevant only for the first moments of booting, and for placement of boot partition.
Yes I have. Before I updated the BIOS I tried a 40GB drive and the machine didn't recognize the drive at all. Since updating the BIOS I know that the machine will read a 40GB drive. I have not tried anything larger, but if the board manufacturer is correct, 40GB is the limit with the BIOS update.
As Carlos mentioned there was the time that we had to type number of heads, cylinders and sectors, but linux worked.
I can't say for sure, that it will work, as it can be some limitation in disk controller.
I'm sure that even with the BIOS limitation to 1024 cylinders, which is long time obsolete, it was possible to use much larger drives than recognized by the BIOS. The only limitation was that kernel and initrd must be within first 1024 cylinders. That was usually assured by setting small boot partition in the begining of the drive, up to the 1023 cylinder (numbering is starting with 0 ). That is actually where separate boot partition has its purpose.
This is way over my head, but I'm trying to wrap my brain around this. I can set auto detection for the primary drive (or all of the peripherals for that matter) in the BIOS, but since the BIOS is the first to load (?) and the board manufacturer says with the BIOS update I have that the largest drive I can use is 40GB, how do I get a larger drive to be read so I can load the operating system on it? Not that I need anything larger than a 40GB drive anyway. -- Dwain Alford P.O. Box 145 Winfield, Alabama 35594 telephone: 205.487.2570 cellphone: 205.495.5619 "The artist may use any form which his expression demands; for his inner impulse must find suitable expression." Wassily Kandinsky, "Concerning The Spiritual In Art" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 2007-04-04 22:53, dwain wrote:
<snip> first to load (?) and the board manufacturer says with the BIOS update I have that the largest drive I can use is 40GB, how do I get a larger drive to be read so I can load the operating system on it? Not that I need anything larger than a 40GB drive anyway.
Whatever "device driver" is in the BIOS is completely replaced by the driver with the Linux kernel, and that can certainly read anything the IDE controller is able to read. With 40-wire IDE cable, that should be anything up to 120GB. There may be other limiting factors, but in principle, you should be able to reach the 120GB limit once the kernel is loaded. The only requirement, as others have noted, is that everything the system needs to boot, ie. everything up to and including the kernel and IDE drivers (which should be compiled into the kernel anyway, or at least in the initrd) must be in a location the BIOS can find. That is trivial to achieve, as you only need a /boot partition of 10 MB or so, which is only 1 or 2 cylinders. If you make a separate /boot partition on the first two cylinders, you have more than enough room for the kernel and initrd, plus any boot loader files. Even only one cylinder should be sufficient, if you do not intend to install other kernels on the system. What I would suggest you try, if inclined, is to borrow an 80GB drive and install it as /dev/hdc. Then boot the system, run (as root) "fdisk -l /dev/hdc", and see what it says. I will be surprised if it does not report a full 80GB on the drive. -- Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. -- HG Wells -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Rajko M. wrote:
I'm sure that even with the BIOS limitation to 1024 cylinders, which is long time obsolete, it was possible to use much larger drives than recognized by the BIOS. The only limitation was that kernel and initrd must be within first 1024 cylinders. That was usually assured by setting small boot partition in the begining of the drive, up to the 1023 cylinder (numbering is starting with 0 ). That is actually where separate boot partition has its purpose.
Isn't a separate /boot also required when using LVM or software RAID? -- Use OpenOffice.org http://www.openoffice.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
James Knott wrote:
Isn't a separate /boot also required when using LVM or software RAID? Not any more. It was recommended with 8.0 or maybe 8.2, but I know I quit having a separate boot for my software raid 1 with 9.3, and it is working with no real problems now with 10.2.
-- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 The Thursday 2007-04-05 at 20:05 +0800, Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Isn't a separate /boot also required when using LVM or software RAID? Not any more. It was recommended with 8.0 or maybe 8.2, but I know I quit having a separate boot for my software raid 1 with 9.3, and it is working with no real problems now with 10.2.
With any type of raid, any level? I can understand this working with a mirror set: the kernel can load from any one side. But what about level 5, for instance? There is no single driver from which to load the kernel, you have to read from the three in the precise order. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Made with pgp4pine 1.76 iD8DBQFGFOrbtTMYHG2NR9URAmhMAKCY+AYjXo3Le5NBlRYRhO/srYebpwCfWkg6 YvRSXSZmfR2UQTsb2m1djbg= =FyHI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Carlos E. R. wrote:
With any type of raid, any level? I'm not sure, I have only used raid 1.
-- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
On 4/5/07, Carlos E. R.
With any type of raid, any level? I can understand this working with a mirror set: the kernel can load from any one side. But what about level 5, for instance? There is no single driver from which to load the kernel, you have to read from the three in the precise order.
With initrd, it shouldn't matter. The initrd ramdisk is small and loaded first, but probably should be on the first disk, since you have to specify a partition. That's why I never liked software RAID. Further, with an LVM, if you lose the first drive, then(from my understanding), you can't get any data off the other drives. That's why I don't use it. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
Joe Morris (NTM) wrote:
James Knott wrote:
Isn't a separate /boot also required when using LVM or software RAID?
Not any more. It was recommended with 8.0 or maybe 8.2, but I know I quit having a separate boot for my software raid 1 with 9.3, and it is working with no real problems now with 10.2.
i should have qualified that, not any more for software raid. With LVM, I think so. -- Joe Morris Registered Linux user 231871 running openSUSE 10.2 x86_64 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org
participants (10)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Darryl Gregorash -
dwain -
Gavin Chester -
Greg Freemyer -
James Knott -
Joe Morris (NTM) -
Larry Stotler -
Rajko M. -
Randall R Schulz