[NBLUG/talk] A Non-linux Hardware Question

[Chris Palmer]

Stephen Cilley writes:

> 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?

It depends entirely on the demands your application puts on the storage
system. There is no single, magic answer.

In a game system, I imagine disk access is generally sequential and not
often interrupted (you are single-tasking, and just reading large hunks
of game data). Without thinking about it any further, I'd guess you want
a disk with the greatest throughput and the lowest seek times you can
get. (Even the highest throughput drive will not saturate your bus,
though.) The WD Caviar you referred to earlier looks like a reasonable
choice along these lines. Also it might help to set a large block size
on your filesystem, since you will be concerned about performance in
reading large data objects. (This will result in some wasted space for
small files, but on a 320 GB disk, it probably won't affect you any time
soon.)


-- 
https://www.eff.org/about/staff/#chris_palmer

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