[NBLUG/talk] A Non-linux Hardware Question

Stephen Cilley hydro_mancer at yahoo.com
Sat Dec 31 02:12:24 PST 2005


Thanks so much for your reply.
Actually, I wasn't talking about making a seperate
partition, I was always told that there were distinct
advantages to having a seperate physical drive for the
OS.
Also, in this case I won't have any *nix systems on it
at all.  It's my gaming machine.
So do you think there is no advantage to having a
seperate drive?
Thank you,
Stephen


--- Lincoln Peters <sampln at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> On Friday 30 December 2005 15:28, Stephen Cilley
> wrote:
> > I'm swapping out my hard drive for an
> exponentially
> > more expensive solution.  I'm thinking about doing
> two
> > of these in mirror:
> >
>
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822136003
> 
> *drool*
> 
> (Not that I'm questioning Bob's comment about the
> reliability of hard drives 
> shipped by NewEgg; that just looks like a REALLY
> nice hard drive.)
> 
> > If that's a horribly off idea then feel free to
> > comment, but that's not my real question, my real
> > question is this: people have told me in the past
> that
> > the OS should be on a separate hard drive, but I
> can't
> > remember, is the drive supposed to be ultra fast
> or is
> > it supposed to be cheaper/slower.  I was thinking
> > about doing a 4.2 KRPM drive or whatever, just
> want to
> > know what I should use for the OS.
> 
> What I have on my primary system is a set of three
> drives and two RAID arrays 
> as follows:
> 
> hda:	total 300GB; 50GB for raid #1, 249GB for raid
> #2, 1GB for swap
> hde: total 300GB; same layout at hda
> hdg: total 250GB; 249GB for raid #2, 1GB for swap
> 
> "raid #1" is a RAID-1 (mirrored) array containing my
> root filesystem, with a 
> total capacity of 50GB.  "raid #2" is a RAID-5
> (distributed parity), with a 
> total capacity of 498GB.  I have 3GB of swap.
> 
> Because of the way it's laid out, if any one of
> these hard drives fail (and 
> they have failed in the past), it's possible that
> one or both arrays will be 
> degraded, but neither will fail unless two hard
> drives fail simultaneously.  
> In fact, as long as the swap partition doesn't fail
> on a hard drive while 
> it's in use, the system will keep running just fine
> with one failed drive 
> (and if I was *that* worried about uptime, I could
> make the swap into a 
> RAID-5 array, at the cost of some response time when
> using the swap).
> 
> 
> If you install two 320GB hard drives, you could
> partition each of them 
> identically, with separate partitions for the root
> filesystem, /home 
> directory, swap, and whatever else you need (I'd
> probably go with 50GB for 
> the root, 169GB for /home, and 1GB for swap; you
> could ).  Then join each 
> partition on one drive to its counterpart on the
> other drive in a RAID-1 
> array (except for swap, unless really you think
> you'd need redundant swap).  
> You won't get the performance boost of having
> different filesystems 
> distributed across different hard disks, but the
> RAID-1 implementation in the 
> newer kernels should give you some performance gain,
> and the failure of 
> either drive will not cause data loss.
> 
> -- 
> Lincoln Peters
> <sampln at sbcglobal.net>
> 
> We all dream of being the darling of everybody's
> darling.
> 
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