Strategies after buying new hard drive

[Andrew Cowie]

On Wed, 2004-08-12 at 22:19 -0500, Logan Rathbone wrote:
> So, the hard drive I get will be at least 40 GB or so but I want to
> keep all of my Arch Linux OS intact (Windows is more volatile, I don't
> care if I have to scrap it).

Something you might consider is I/O loads. Depending on what you're
doing with this machine, you would do well to spread the read/writes
between different drive spindles.

For a long time, Unix has done very well at being spread across several
physical disks. The thing you really want to avoid is thrashing (a drive
head having to constantly rush from one place to another). This can
happen if *excessive* swap or tmp files are in use or if something is
aggressively writing (an active web server log, a serious mail queue,
that sort of thing) while trying to do big reads (serving up some major
file).

[A more recent example, from the Oracle database world, is to dedicate
several spindles (especially striped RAID 0) just for the REDO logs -
they *have* to be written physically to disk before Oracle will report a
transaction committed; how long it takes for the official data blocks to
migrate from cache down to permanent storage is less relevant, but one
generally wants the redo logs to be written as blazingly fast as
possible; having other disk activity taking place on a device gets int
the way of that and is to be avoided]

On small Linux servers I run, I tend to have /, /usr and /export[/www]
on one disk, and /var on another. That way the mail queue and web log
writing activity on the second drive doesn't interfere with loading
binaries and serving content off of the first disk.

So, if you have a 4 GB drive and some spanky new drive, then one idea
you might consider is putting swap, /tmp, on the 4 GB, and have the more
bulky occasional stuff on the other disk. It all depends on what you're
trying to do with this system.

Of course, the nature of your disks (SCSI vs IDE) and controllers (one
channel, two channel, integrated, etc) all weigh into consideration of
what gains you might achieve.

> So, should I back up important files and start from scratch?

That largely depends on whether or not your system is working [well]. If
you're happy with it, then leave it alone. The amount of time we all
waste [re]building systems is astonishing.

AfC
Sydney

-- 
Andrew Frederick Cowie

Helping you succeed at flawlessly executing Massive
Changes and Upgrades to your Mission Critical Systems
http://www.operationaldynamics.com/

Sydney   New York   Toronto   London
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