I have a 60 gb ata/100 7200 rpm which all my partitions are on right now.

I recently picked up a symbios sym8951u ultra2 scsi card, and a quantum viking ii 4.5 gb scsi hard drive.

If i do lots of multitasking/multiuser stuff, would it be worthwhile to mount my /usr partition on the scsi disk? currently it is about 2gb or so. Or is ultra2 too outdated (i think it's 80 mbps peak).

Thanks.

does anyone know?

It sort of depends on your workload. The Ultra2 is by no means unusable (I have a PIII-based system that runs the whole system off an Ultra2 adapter and it works just fine.)

The tough question is whether 4.5GB will be large enough for /usr. So much stuff winds up getting installed under /usr (especially /usr/local/) that it might fill up quickly. One thing that might be useful to stash out on the SCSI disk is additional swap space. Personally, I'd make a second swap partition the same size as whatever you have defined on /dev/hda but you know your swap needs better than anyone. One thing you could do is run "cd / ; du -sk +ACo-" and see: 1.) what would even fit on the SCSI disk and 2.) whether placing such-and-such directory tree on the other drive would help out with any I/O bottlenecks you might be experiencing. A couple of examples... Do you move a lot of mail around? If so, then perhaps moving /var onto the SCSI disk would help (this depends on the mail package you're using so YMMV). Are users writing software that makes a lot of temporary files? If so, then creating a separate filesystem for /tmp on the SCSI disk would be useful.

There are a lot of possibilities on what you could do with that disk. The relatively small size of that drive doesn't mean it's not all that useful, either. Up until quite recently, I had a couple of systems that were running Linux and using only 2GB and 4GB disks for the filesystems containing the OS and utlilties -- the larger disks were for images and database files -- and I never had any real problems. If you ask around, you can probably find other disks that some folks are considering just tossing out which would be right at home hanging off the Symbios card.

Good luck and have fun,

Rick