backup & low downtime for home network

[Robert Brockway]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2007, Chris Aitken wrote:

I wrote:

>> Well "it depends".  For IDE there will be a performance gain for reads and
>> writes if the two drives are on different channels.  If the two drives are
>> on the same channel there may be a performance hit for reads and will be a
>> performance hit for writes.
>
> That I did not know. I am doing the hard drive installations now. So, I

Basically IDE could do multi-drive on a single channel but it wasn't very
good at it :)

> should put one drive on one IDE cable (I guess we call that IDE1) and the
> other on the other cable (IDE2)? So, then do I jumper them both as

It's likely to be IDE0 & IDE1.  IDE0 has hda & hdb while IDE has hdc & hdd
typically.

> "Single/Master", "Master" or what? I guess each hard drive will be Master on

I'd do each one as Master on its own channel.

> it's respective IDE cable and the DVD burner and CD-ROM as Slave. In the past
> I've not put CD drive and hard drive on the same cable because I hear that
> data transfer speed will dumb down to the CD drive speed. Will this affect me

I've also often heard this.  I can't recall if I've ever seen it.  I can
say for sure I have put cdroms on the same channel as a HDD many times and
not had a problem.

> or only when I'm actually /using/ the CD-ROM or DVD drive?

If the problem strikes I believe it is meant to be "all the time".

While we are on the subject of running IDE HDDs on different channels, you
could add one swap partition per drive and run them with equal swap
priority to boost swapping performance also.  This would preclude mirroing
the swap space of course.  As usual it is a tradeoff between performance
and reliability.

Cheers,

Rob

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