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Old 07-19-2006, 04:28 AM   #1
sl4ckw4re
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swap: beginning of fast disk or beggining of second disk


Hi. I have 2 hard drives. 1 Western Digital 8M buffer (primary ide: hda , considered fast disk) and 1 Seagate 2M buffer (secondary ide: hdc , considered slow disk) both 7200RPM's. Now, how should I add the swap space, cause I've seen so many threads, one say it's best to be on the beggining of the fast drive, some other say it's best to be on other drive than the one the system is booted on (implicitly in my case the slower drive). So I will make it at the beggining of the drive, but which drive ... the fast one from which the system will boot from or the slow one, which i only use to store some data.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 06:09 AM   #2
syg00
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It depends ...
And, it probably won't matter ...

A non-busy disk would be best. If you use the system disk heavily, pick the data disk. If it's reading the data when it's swapping most, use the system disk.
See what I mean - how are you going to know ???.

I'd be inclined to allocate swap on both (mounted at the same priority), and let kswapd stripe over the two disks.
Best solution is to have enough RAM so it doesn't need to swap.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 09:28 AM   #3
sl4ckw4re
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i did 2 swap partitions each of 512MB (hda1 and hdc1) both at the beggining of each drive. when i started setup it asked me if i want to add both of them as swap partitions, i said Yes and it started with hdc1 (formatting and adding) then hda1, and that's the order in /etc/fstab too, first one is hdc1 and then hda1. maybe the setup choosed the best option ? or should i still set the priority the same to both of the swap's. at boot i see a message with hdc havin priority -1 and hda having priority -2, how can i set them same priority and what priority should i set ? my fstab currently looks like this:
Code:
bash-3.00$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hdc1        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
/dev/hda1        swap             swap        defaults         0   0
So how, where and what to modify ? Thanks alot.
 
Old 07-19-2006, 04:29 PM   #4
dennisk
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sl4ckw4re,

I was reading something about this the other day and the writer suggested putting swap on the outside portion of the hard drive since it travels faster than the inside portion. (hmm, won't it be better with your most used data, /home there?)

Frankly, I won't worry in most cases, just try to avoid using swap. Add more RAM or check which programs are hogging memory. Swap is always dog slow compared the the other options.

Dennisk
 
Old 07-19-2006, 07:41 PM   #5
syg00
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Simplest is to replace the word defaults with "pri=1" (no quotes - number can be anything).
 
  


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