Hello,

I’m not having any trouble on my system but have been wondering if there would be any benefit of having different drives for different directories.

For example:
/boot and / on sda1
swap on sdb1
/opt on sdc1
/home on sdd1
etc...

Would it actually improve your system because of unloading data from different hdds for a particular task, instead of scanning different sectors of 1 hdd for the same task?

In general, yes separation between drives helps. These days I find that much of what is do is not bound by disk performance though, and I have gone to a model where I have a small disk with boot, system, and swap. Then I have a NFS server with a /home and /common area.

If you have older, smaller drives, you might consider having boot and swap on one drive. Then you could, for example, have the system drive be a USB stick if you were playing with different distributions, etc.

You might also want to have a partition large enough for you to periodically snap a mirror of your /etc and /home areas.

What type of hardware, and disk drives are you planning on using...that would impact how one might lay things out?

Hi,

it is useful to have data which are at once written/read on different disks. I have two disks in my server, when I move data from one disk to another that's faster than moving data from one partition to another on the same disk.

If you have a system with few of RAM and therefore the Swapspace is often used, your system would profit if you put the swapspace on another disk than your /usr or /home directory.

Markus

Thank you for your replies.

I’m not currently in the process of implementing this idea but I may do it in my next system build.

Maybe not a different hdd for every directory but just separate my swap and and other frequently written to directories.

Wouldn't this help with speed, as you are retrieving data from 2 separate disks? Kind of like how RAID 0 works. That is, assume the data you're after is over 2 different disks.

Fix the problem, not the symptom.
So what is your swap rate - say in pages per second/minute/hour ?.

Actually there is no problem. My system is working well as it is with all main directories on different partitions of 1 disk. I was just wondering if performance would be better with splitting it across disks. I cant help but try to improve on something even if its miniscule.

Also, how would you go about benchmarking swap?

It is very common to have a separate /home partition. This allows retaining your personal files between reinstalls.
A /boot partition is needed if you use raid or lvm volumes.

For servers, separate partitions allow the file systems to be mounted differently, and prevent logs from filing up the root partition.