On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, David Gilbert wrote: >Personally, I have an old 6gig drive on which I have a dump partition >(it doesn't need to be active swap). 6gig drives are too slow to be >useful these days. > >I generally allocate 4 swap partitions on fast drives where each is >about 1/2 of memory (2x total). Speed of swap is as important as size >of swap.
Allocating an older drive solely as dumpon device can be an excellent strategy provided you have space for it on your controller. On the average workstation there are typically 2 IDE channels supporting 4 devices total. With a (CD|DVD)-ROM plus a CD-RW occupying space plus your system drive there is often little room to get creative with multiple drives without losing PCI slots to additional controllers. Besides, allocating seperate partitions on seperate drives as interleaved swap really only buys you anything if each partition is on a seperate controller in the IDE case so you're limited to two drives anyway. Of course this is not the approach I take with my personal workstations, just the approach most people seem to take. I personally stick with SCSI for all of the peripherals (optical drives, etc) in my workstations. Once upon a time I used SCSI hard drives exclusively as well but the general degradation of quality in SCSI drives has made me have to reevaluate whether the price premium is worth it, especially given the relatively small capacities my money will now buy me with SCSI compared to the IDE market. As long as I can get IDE drives with Seagate Barracuda stamped on top I can at least keep telling myself it'll be just as good. ;-) Well, that and the fact that I try very, very hard not to let my workstation actually touch the swap partition and if I notice swap usage becoming a problem I tend to buy more RAM. I mostly keep a swap partition around in case I need to get a crash dump. [ This thread is fairly interesting to me. It's always cool to hear how other people run their setups, even if I don't agree with all of them. ] Brandon D. Valentine -- http://www.geekpunk.net [EMAIL PROTECTED] ++[>++++++<-]>[<++++++>-]<.>++++[>+++++<-]>[<+++++>-]<+.+++++++..++ +.>>+++++[<++++++>-]<++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+. To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
