On Thursday 20 April 2006 00:46 Neil Bothwick was like: > > Am I correct in understanding that I can use LVM2 to stripe a volume > > across more than one disk, just like a raid 0 setup, even if the disks > > are quite dissimilar? Would it be possible (or worthwhile) to allocate > > my old 40GB disk and a portion of my new disk (say another 40GB) to a > > single logical volume to be used as a fast audio and video > > scratchspace? (For Linux, that is -- I am aware that it wouldn't be > > accessible from Windows). I would keep the rest of disk in normal > > partitions to reduce the risk of losing all my data to disk failure. > > It is perfectly possible, but performance may suffer if one disk is > slower than the other, compared with using the fast disk alone. Another > option may be to use the old disk for the operating systems and the new > one for data. Speed of the OS disk only affects program loading time, > you would then get maximum performance when using the programs.
Thanks for your help once again, Neil. The problem I am trying to solve is less about getting best all-round disk performance than it is to get super-duper disk performance when doing extremely disk intensive tasks such as video and audio editing. I'm not sure that having the OS or the swap on different disks because if I have enough memory I shouldn't need to access them very much while doing the audio and video stuff. The disks are probably not too dissimilar in terms of read and write speed (I'll need to look up the specs to verify this). However the cache sizes are quite different: 1MB as opposed to 8MB. Would the smaller cache make the older disk much slower in practice when it comes to writing or reading very large files -- slow enough to bog down the other one if a volume was striped across them? Robert -- Robert Persson Conspiracy Bears: Once upon a time there were lots of conspiracy bears... -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
