Hi

Is there an advantage to having a separate hard drive for the swap disk/file, is it worth it?

Another question, can I put /home/name/directory so that each drive will show up as a directory in home view such as;

drive 1 /home/bbe/pictures
drive 1 /home/bbe/videos
drive 2 /home/bbe/something else
drive 3 /home/bbe/other things

Thank you

If you don't swap, it don't matter.
If you *do* swap, it might. Pretty expensive option I would have thought. Personally I prefer to have multiple swap partitions (same priority) on separate drives. This is effectively a "stripe set" that kswapd manages itself.
So long as the disks aren't otherwise active (I/O-wise), seems to work o.k. Find some data that doesn't get hit very often, and put that on the same drives if you can.
Don't go putting things like video streaming against active swap.

The reason that you might want to put any disk partition on a new disk is to spread I/O over the disks to lighten the load on each disk. I have never seen a Linux system aggressively swap. In other words the little bit of swap file activity that I normally see on Linux systems is spread out over time. That means that there is no advantage to putting a swap file on a separate disk.

You can mount disk partitons onto any directory in the directory tree. So, yes, you can mount disk partitions onto directories in a user's home directory. For example using your original post:
Naturally, whatever the real device names are should be substituted for what I wrote.

Keep in mind that the only time swap is needed is if your usage push RAM past its capacity, and the system is forced to write memory pages to the hard drive. Back in the days where having 32Mg of RAM was considered bleeding edge, it was easy to do that, but with modern systems having 256Mg or 512Mg or even more RAM, it becomes increasingly unlikely.

As syg00 and stress_junkie mentioned significant sustained swapping would be really unusual, and unless your current system is using swap in a big way, putting your swap space on a different drive won't make a difference. How much RAM do you have, and what kinds of swap usage are you seeing right now?

I'm pretty sure I have 768 (if I recall) for sure not less. With my limited Linux knowledge it appears there is not much swap usage.

Is there any advantage in not having a swap partition at all. Just wanting to learn.

Thank you J.W., stress_junkie, and syg00 for you help.

Well .. the advantage is that you save some disk-space. However,
IF you fired up (a) process(es) that gobbled up all available RAM
and you didn't have swap the kernel would kill any random process
to make room for the next ones needs - rather ugly if you were editing
a big video file and got shot in the foot because you lacked 50MB ;}



Cheers,
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