On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 06:34:06PM -0600, David Blevins wrote: > Florin Iucha wrote: > > Do not put two harddrives on the same IDE channel. > > Really, why? What could go wrong/right? IDE channels tend not to have the extra bandwidth you see on a SCSI controller. One drive can pretty well saturate the channel's available capacity, resulting in a performance hit. Make one the primary master and the other the secondary master. I don't agree with Florin about getting an additional controller for your CDROM, though. CD drives don't normally sustain a very high data transfer rate (relative to hard drives) and they also tend to sit idle most of the time, so I don't see any reason not to slave it to whichever drive sees less use. One other option besides Florin's suggestion of backing the small drive up to the larger one would be to set up a RAID 1 mirror of that 20 G and use the other 60 G of the big drive for your mp3 collection or whatever else you can get by without. A little more complex than keeping the drives separate and not as good for performance, but the system will just keep right on going if either drive fails. (I'd do it, but I'm on a RAID kick right now, buying extra drives and setting up RAID on everything I see, whether it's called for or not. YMWillProbablyV.) Finally, set up swap partitions on both drives and, in fstab, add "pri=10" to the options for both of them. If you force multiple swap partitions to the same priority (the pri option), the kernel will load-balance across them. Works quite nicely. -- When we reduce our own liberties to stop terrorism, the terrorists have already won. - reverius Innocence is no protection when governments go bad. - Tom Swiss