UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hey everyone,

first of all, this is the motherboard I have: GigaByte GA-K8NXP-9 , nForce4 Ultra. It supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1 apparently both on the IDE and S-ATA HDD.

Now what I had in mind is popping 2 x 6Gb HDD in the IDE slots as slave 1 & 2 where my 2 DVD/CD burners are master. I then plan on only making a 3Gb partition that is used as SWAP by linux as the HDD are not fully used and perfomance should be better?

The 2 x SATA HDD will also be used under RAID 1.

Well, what I want to ask is if anyone has done this before and can it be recommended or discouraged? I don't know how the SWAP works exactly and specially not under RAID 1. Only thought that RAID 1 would make reading the SWAP faster...

any ideas are welcome!

Hi,

wow, that's an unusual idea But first of all, how much memory do you have ? And why are you planing to use 3 GB swap ????

In my business we are working with Fileservers of 32GB RAM and even they have only 2 GB and only using more or less nothing, so why do you need this amount of swap ?

regarding the raid issue, you want to use raid 1 , right ? raid 1 is mirroring and doesn't provide any performance improve, it is only redundant to have the data save. and in general, with using a hw raid, indipendent which raid level, the bios is doing this stuff and the operating system only gets the raid device file, so it doesn't cares what is behind the raid device file, it simply uses it.

Therefore, you can do what you are planing, weather it is usefull

Cheers
malcom

Hi again,

well, I actually plan on having a swap of 1,5Gb as my RAM is up on 1Gb but want the partition to be 3Gb (just in case).

The reason for the raid idea is that I have been told and have read that write performance is the same when using raid 1 but read perfomance is higher as both HDD are read and therefore the data is porcessed faster.

is this maybe just an urban myth? now you are making me wonder...but it stills sounds pretty wicked ;-)