Strategies after buying new hard drive

[Andrew Hammond]

cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org wrote:

>>>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.
>>>      
>>>
>>And how slow would that make /tmp and swap?  4GB drives are terribly
>>slow by todays drive speeds.
>>    
>>
>
>Indeed.  It's likely that your newer disk will be faster than the older
>ones.
>
>Unless it's a 140GB drive (right, Drew? ;-))..
>

4GB commodity disk? That's gotta be about 6 years old, right? Guaranteed 
any new disk (except laptop gear, which I know almost nothing about) 
will seek faster. It's almost guaranteed to die in the next year or two 
anyway. Personally, I'd throw the 4GB in the trash. Or crack it open and 
make some ninja frisbees.

If you're dead set on keeping it, you could use it for a log partition, 
or something that gets mostly sequential writes without seeing too much 
performance degradation. You really want to learn about SMART before you 
move any data onto that disk though.

If you haven't picked your new drive, I'd suggest a WD Raptor (assuming 
that you've got good power and cooling in your chassis, obviously). Last 
I checked (about 7 months ago), they had the best seek times. Which is 
not a big surprise since they based on mid-range SCSI disks with a SATA 
interface. They're also 10kRPM disks, so sequential reads and writes can 
really get some value out of that SATA interface. They aren't 
particularly cheap however.

Drew

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