On Mon, Mar 18, 2002 at 07:16:25PM -0600, Florin Iucha wrote: > > I don't agree with Florin about getting an additional controller for > > your CDROM, though. > > Bzzzzzt! I didn't say that! > > I said: go buy another controller and put the big HDD on it. OK, you didn't say why and I assumed an incorrect reason. > > 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. > > Bzzzzt. A CD-ROM slave to a HDD will slow down the HDD. And will force > the HDD to the same PIO mode, slowing it down even more I stand corrected. Looks like the design of IDE is even worse than I thought. > > 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. > > I have an uneasy feeling about unbalanced RAID. Yes it works but... There is the question of whether the RAID manager is smart enough to just read off the smaller drive when the larger is otherwise occupied. Any other problems you can put your finger on or is it just an intuitive thing? > Hmm... it's not worth to put a 80 gig HDD to work just because the > kernel feels like distributing the 2 megs it has to swap. Leave only > data on the 80 gigs and it will sleep when appropriate while the 20 > gigger will be still busy with cron jobs and other maintenance. ...assuming your drives are set to go to sleep. Just like the 'should you turn your computer off at night?' debate, though, there's the question of whether increased stress from starting and stopping the drive will shorten its life significantly, so many of us leave our drives spinning at all times. If you have yours sleep, though, then I agree that you should make sure that they're not going be get woken up just for swap. -- 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