Swap Partitioning and multiple disks

Ok so I have been setting up a workstation with Arch Linux that has a total of 16GB of RAM and, because it will run very memory intensive applications we actually require a large swap partition. Because this may eventually get upgraded to even more RAM we decided to go with a 50 GB swap partition.
I also have two drives in the machine, the primary 500GB HDD and a smaller 250 GB HDD that we wanted to use for a /backup partition as well as swap space and so I set up the disks as follows:
sda (500 GB):
/ (30 GB Primary Partition)
/home (435 GB Primary Partition)
/usr/local (2 GB Primary Partition)
sdb (250 GB)
50 GB Primary swap partition
/backup (~200 GB Primary Partition)
Now when I am in gparted or cfdisk that is how these partitions show up. If I do a df I see
sda1, sda2, sda3, and sdb2 but instead of seeing what woul;d be sdb1 as a large swap I see an 8 GB swap listed as being mounted on /dev/shm (which I think is normal).
After reading this:
http://lissot.net/partition/partition-04.html
I think the problem is that I don't have a swap partition set on my 500 GB drive. It seems like any bootable drive needs a swap partition on it. Although my system boots fine and I haven't had any problems running it yet I do need to get this swap partition straightened out otherwise the machine will have issues when it is fully operational and running heavy jobs.
IS this the problem? And if so would the best way to fix it be to use parted to shrink my /home partition by a few GB and make a small swap partition on that drive at the end of the drive space? Right now it is laid out as:
|---------------- / ----------------| |---- /usr/local ----| |------------------------------------------ /home ------------------------------------------|
Suggestions, ideas?
Thanks

The output from free -m is:
<code>
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 16018 15372 645 0 91 14600
-/+ buffers/cache: 679 15338
Swap: 47685 0 47685
</code>
For comparison here is the output from my laptop (also Arch Linux):
<code>
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2025 614 1411 0 12 232
-/+ buffers/cache: 370 1655
Swap: 1019 0 1019
</code>
It has an ~ 1GB swap partition but it's df also shows something at /dev/shm:
<code>
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 12G 7.6G 3.4G 70% /
none 1013M 0 1013M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3 78G 28G 47G 37% /data
</code>
In gparted on my laptop /dev/sda2 is the swap partition with size: 1019 MB
Going by free -m on the workstation it looks like it is seeing the ~50 GB swap partition and it is mounted in /etc/fstab so perhaps I have nothing to worry about? Is it actually necessary that your bootable disk has a swap partition on it? Both disks (sda and sdb) actually have at least one partition flagged as bootable but sda (which has / and /home on it) didn't have a swap partition on that disk.
Thanks for all the help.

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Hi, thanks for your replies,
I have been looking at the disk management utility. What I usually do is make my DAW/uadio partition first when I format as it wriotes to teh outer part of the hard disk which is quicker as teh read and write heads have less to travel, and then I stick my main general partition next, as i dont care if its not so fast.
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Cheers

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Hello,
I have inhereted a problem with one of our Solaris 9 machines. When it was set up, we did a custom filesystem layout (always have). The tradition is to put / on slice 0, and swap on slice 1 with a space roughly 2 times the physical memory space.
However, I goofed, and put /swap instead of just "swap". So now, it has a / filesystem, a /swap filesystem, and no swap device!
# swap -l
No swap devices configured
# df -k
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0    3328137 3052914 241942    93%    /
/proc                      0       0       0     0%    /proc
mnttab                     0       0       0     0%    /etc/mnttab
fd                         0       0       0     0%    /dev/fd
swap                  332384     168 332216     1%    /var/run
swap                  332352     136 332216     1%    /tmp
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I have added swap space before using 'mkfile' and 'swap -a' before, but what I want to do is blow away the /swap partition and re-format (if necessary) and re-mount as a regular swap partition.
This server is in production (yikes!), so any helpful hints that don't involve downtime would be appreciated.
I'm going to assume I need to edit vfstab and run the format command at LEAST, but I'm not entirely sure of the correct method.
TIA,
-Jacob Vann
New Mexico State University

You're ok here.
Simply unmount the /swap file system, edit /etc/vfstab and change swap to point to this location like normal. Then you should able to swap -a on it I think. I reboot might be necessary - not sure as I've never had to fix something like this. Once you fix /etc/vfstab, a reboot will definitely fix it :)

Swap Partition Vs Swap file

Hi everyone!!
I am using Oracle 11g (enterprise edition) on linux redhat 5.5 . At present, we have 12G RAM and swap partition of 2G. I know that we should have swap area of 6GB as per RAM. But we are unable to create new swap partition or resize existing. So I want to know is should I create new swap file of 4Gb that can be used as swap area in addition to existing swap partition of 2Gb. So that total swap area will be of 6G
( 2G swap space + 4G swap file).
1. Will it be meaningful or not ?
2. Which one is better among swap partition and swap file ?
3. Will swap file cause performance degradation due to incompatibility between them ?
Thanks & Regards
Tushar Lapani

Swap is no substitute for RAM. It provides a fail-safe mechanism and allows the kernel to handle active memory allocation more efficiently.
Your requirement or conclusion about swap space may or may not be reasonable, depending on your desired configuration. As a rule of thumb, swap space is usually configured twice the RAM if you use 8 GB or less and equal the amount of RAM if you have 16 GB or more. If you have 64 GB of RAM, it does however not make sense to have 64 GB of swap space, because the performance degration should you ever need that much swap space will be very bad.
A swap file as opposed to a swap partition has some security and safety concerns, and some performance overhead because of using a file system, but it can be feasible. It depends on your I/O use and hardware.
However, you will probably want to configure your Oracle database to use kernel Hugepages using ASMM instead of AMM for best performance and efficient memory use. Kernel Hugepages, unlike POSIX shared memory (/dev/shm) used by AMM, will be pre-allocated at system startup and cannot use swap space.
Message was edited by: Dude!
Until kernel 2.4 it was considered that a swap partition is faster than a file, but with the improvements of kernel 2.6, the performances is almost the same. A swap file has the advantage that it can be easier re-sized or removed than a swap partition, but it can get fragmented or deleted by accident. For best performance it should also be located at the outer parts (beginning) of the disk.

Swap partition VS Swap File system

Hi everyone!!
I am using Oracle 11g (enterprise edition) on linux redhat 5.5 . At present, we have 12G RAM and swap partition of 2G. I know that we should have swap area of 6GB as per RAM. But we are unable to create new swap partition or resize existing. So I want to know is should I create new swap file of 4Gb that can be used as swap area in addition to existing swap partition of 2Gb. So that total swap area will be of 6G
( 2G swap space + 4G swap file).
1. Will it be meaningful or not ?
2. Which one is better among swap partition and swap file ?
3. Will swap file cause performance degradation due to incompatibility between them ?
Thanks & Regards
Tushar Lapani

This is a 100 percent Unix question and has nothing to with Oracle RDBMS.
Please close this question here and post it in any Unix forum.
Sybrand Bakker
Senior Oracle DBA

How to mount and use swap partition _only_ for hibernation ?

By "hibernation" I mean suspend to disk.
My disk is a bit poor in RAM and the dirsk is slow, so I want to prevent any swap use of my system.
AND I want to use hibernation, in order to boot fatser... and not to loose my workspace state.
With a swap partition, hibernation works nicely.
But any intensive web browser easily lealds to incresed memory usage, hence swap use.
I have lowered the swap priority in /etc/fstab, down to 1 (and even tried 0).
Still, I am not satisfied : If would like not to use swap at all but for hibernation.
My plan was hence :
1) disable the automatic swap mount at boot
2) add a systemd unit to only moutn before hibernation
The first part was easy : I added a "noauto" option in /etc/fstab. Great, no more mounted swap. But, as expected, no more successful hibernation.
Then I tried to create a custom systemd unit.
- first copy the unit file automatically generated by systemd in /run/systemd/generator/dev-....swap to /etc/systemd/system/
- and add "Before=sleep.target" line in the Unit section
Result file here :
> cat /etc/systemd/system/dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.swap
[Unit]
Description=Swap required for hibernation
Before=sleep.target
[Swap]
What=/dev/disk/by-uuid/blablablablabla
Priority=5
>
Next step show be to enable it, but I first run a safety check :
> systemctl show dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.swap
Id=dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.swap
Names=dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.swap
Requires=-.mount
Wants=system.slice
BindsTo=dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.device
RequiredBy=swap.target
WantedBy=dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.device
Conflicts=umount.target
Before=sleep.target umount.target swap.target
After=systemd-journald.socket dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.device system.slice -.mount
RequiresMountsFor=/dev/disk/by-uuid/blablablabla
Description=Swap required for hibernation
LoadState=loaded
ActiveState=inactive
SubState=dead
FragmentPath=/etc/systemd/system/dev-disk-by\x2duuid-blablablabla.swap
UnitFileState=static
InactiveExitTimestampMonotonic=0
ActiveEnterTimestampMonotonic=0
ActiveExitTimestampMonotonic=0
InactiveEnterTimestampMonotonic=0
CanStart=yes
CanStop=yes
CanReload=no
CanIsolate=no
StopWhenUnneeded=no
RefuseManualStart=no
RefuseManualStop=no
AllowIsolate=no
DefaultDependencies=yes
>
The problem here is that, somehow, a RequiredBy=swap.target line is apaprently automatically added, and makes exactly NOT what I want.
I've been battling a bit with systemd, but so far I have no clue how to do this correctly.
Important : I wand a clean "official" way, not to do a "service" unit that calls an home-brewed script taht calls swapon. I can do that, but systemd should be able to do it better than me, and without any trick.

Hello and thank you all
@fdservices & @WonderWoofy :
In fact, I forgot to mentionned swappiness, just tought about mentionneing the swap priority which act at a very different level is only revelevant when you ahve several swap files.
I have already modified that setting since quite a long time... and it indeed makes the system behaviour so much better.
Honestly, I could do with it... that's what I am doing since a few months in fact, and it really largely improved the user experience.
Still, the setting only makes swapping unlikely, but does not forbid it.
@WonderWoofy & @lucke :
You may be right, I could satisfy with swapiness...
Still, my feeling is that swap at run-time is mostly a remeniscence of the time where having several megabytes of RAM was juste a fantasm. At that time, at least for some intensive operations, simulating more RAM thansk to the cheaper & slower disk capacity was really decisive for a good user experience... and to allow some operations like some huge compilations. My feeling is that today, with our Gigabytes of RAM on our desktop/laptop, the need is much lower. In fact a swap is probably counter-productive for SSD for example (fast, yes, but swap is by nature something you write quite often, reducing teh SSD lifetime significantly). And simulating extra RAM is also counter-productive with applications such as web browsers which handle large amount of memory to handle cache themselves; it causes memory pressure, hence trigger swapping and machien slowdown instead of trigerring their pseudo-smart memory cleaning mechanisms. Last but not least, it does not encourage any improvement on application memory needs and rationalisation.
In fact, unless when I compile huge programs, or on really-limited-memory (embedded) systems, or eventually if swap can be hosted on significantly faster-than-storage disks, I feel that swapping does not really improve the user experience and system performance... and in contrary reduces them by having to handle swapping on and off memory & cache pages.
SO that's why I want to try. It's OK if I fail, swappinees fixes most my user experience issue, but I try to solve my more "theorical" issue as well.
And honestly, it is also to lean & play a bit with systemd as well.
More to come, I have things partially working now. Partially for now, and maybe perfectly with your help ?

SOLVED:systemd tries to activate swap twice (by partition and by UUID)

Hi all,
I'm pretty new to Arch and so far it works very nice. But I have one mostly cosmetical problem. When the system boots, systemd tries to activate my swap partition twice, once for the device /dev/sda2, and once for the same partition by its UUID. Here's the log:
Jan 29 18:45:34 thinkpad-t61 systemd[1]: Activating swap /dev/sda2...
Jan 29 18:45:35 thinkpad-t61 systemd[1]: Activating swap /dev/disk/by-uuid/473dc558-6191-4d57-9a5e-83881c466ae2...
Jan 29 18:45:35 thinkpad-t61 systemd[1]: Activated swap /dev/sda2.
Clearly, the second fails and produces a red [FAILED] which looks like I wasn't able to administrate my system properly. ;-)
Where is it configured what swap partitions are tried to be mounted on boot?
Thanks,
Tassilo
Last edited by tsdh (2014-03-28 08:03:47)

teateawhy wrote:https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=171277
Ups, sorry that I didn't find that somehow. Ok, so I'll remove the swap partition from /etc/fstab.
Thanks,
Tassilo

Auto-detect & mount disk partitions and removable drives

I use ubuntu in addition to my current wip of installing arch linux.Now i have installed lxde desktop. But i am not able to see any of my partitions of my disk and other hdd. Besides removable drives also dont get mounted.
Similarly if a new partition is created the same also gets autodetected in ubuntu. eg my arch linux partition. I need not go to do any fiddling in the system to recognize the same.
So is it possible to achieve the same under archlinux?So want to know how to get the same done.
what i want is to have the partitions[ext & ntfs] detected when the filemanager is opened and mount/unmount at my will, just as i do now in ubuntu.
So far what i have done is based on the lxde wiki, i installed the polkit-gnome gvfs package but nothing is mounted.
i would like to have specific instructions to how to work out and get the above done.
pls guide to the same.
Last edited by beopen (2012-08-12 12:55:15)

cfr wrote :
What do you mean when you say that pcmanfm is not displaying *any* partitions? You see no files at all? Or do you mean: it is not showing partitions not listed in /etc/fstab?
I mean it is not showing partitions not listed in /etc/fstab. As of now pcmanfm shows only the arch systems partitions which I created while installation : root, and home. Balance of partitions of other systems of the same drive and second hard drive is not shown.
When you say that in Ubuntu, newly created partitions show up automatically, do you mean that if you change the partitioning on your internal drive, the changes are automatically reflected in /etc/fstab?
Yes the changes are automatically reflected in the filemanager of ubuntu, ie. Nautilius. However Ubuntu fstab as you see in the previous post of mine contains no entry to other partitions other than just ubuntus.In the fstab I posted above you can very well see it just shows 4 partitions of hdd1 [similar to the way the arch fstab shows only its own] where it is installed :boot,root,home, swap. Whereas there is two more partitions there viz windows and a ntfs. You don’t see them in fstab, but when you open the nautilius filemanager you can see the drives. See the image link of my filemanger posted below at the end. In that shared data and windows are two ntfs partition of hdd1 where ubuntu is installed. Arch is installed on 2nd hdd alongwith a Ubuntu.289gb partition is a ubuntu LVM along with arch root and arch home you can see.
If you mean that Ubuntu automatically adds, mounts and unmounts partitions on removable drives when e.g. a USB stick is inserted or when you change the partitioning on one and create a file system, that you can configure to work automatically in arch.
Yes ubuntu automatically adds, mounts and unmounts partitions on internal drives and also removable drives when e.g. a USB stick is inserted . As you can see in the image i have posted, it shows all my internal drive partitions automatically. No fstab editing nothing. No fiddling with system files so far i have done in ubuntu. For eg i installed arch a month back, the same you can see is automatically seen in the image. All i required was to update grub to recognise árch'. Post that when you boot, automatically the new arch partitions are seen. No fstab fiddling anything. Thus tomorrow morning if i create a new partition on my hdd via ubuntu all i require is to reboot post the creation and i will see the new partition asap.
As you can see in the image all my partitions are seen, the one i want i click it and it gets mounted, if i dont want it stays/gets unmounted. And its not just ubuntu i saw the same in some other distros also like suse,centos,fedora.
As far as the lxde wiki is concerned, there it is mentioned to install polkit gnome gvfs for mounting and i did the same but nothing still happens.
So this is what exactly i am asking how to do the same on my arch system. So if i am guided i wil go ahead and work to achieve the same.
image link of file manager : NautiliusFileManager
Last edited by beopen (2012-08-15 13:00:26)

My Macintosh HD partition is damaged and the disk utility failed to repair it

I cannot boot anymore after I tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility after my Mac became very slow.
This is the second time it happened to me in a week with the same symptoms. When I try to boot, I see a gray screen and the computer just stops
When I use the recovery partition, the disk utility fails to repair the disk, stopping after failing to fix the catalog file.
I started to use TM to backup my data after erasing the disk and reinstalling Mountain Lion but I wonder if my hard drive is damaged because the same problem happened twice. (Thanks TM for keeping my data safe this time)
Any advice or ways to fix that once and for all ?
PS : The worst is that i can still boot with Bootcamp to Windows, not very useful though

rpignard wrote:
Any advice or ways to fix that once and for all ?
Since your Recovery HD and Windows partition work fine, the problem is located in your Macintosh HD partition and I very highly suspect it's bad/failing sectors that's to blame for your troubles.
This can sometimes occur if the computer was moved while the hard drive was in operation, else sectors fail all by themselves, or if the drive is having mechanical issues, which you problem will continue no matter what you do.
This time when you use Recovery > Disk Utility to erase the Macintosh HD partition, use the middle secure erase option, not the far left or right options (the right will work also just take a really long time)
What your doing is with the middle secure erase option is called a "Zero" write, which Disk Utility will write 0's over all the bits in that partition. When it's done it will read it back for confirmation and when it does so, any bits that are failing will be mapped off by the drive. Hopefully this will resolve the issue without needing a drive replacement.
Once that is completed, reinstall OS X from Recovery, any programs from original sources, files only from backup and your problems hopefully should disappear.
What happens is if your data gets corrupted on the boot drive by failing sectors, it gets transfered to TimeMachine (or to bootable clones) and when you restore your right back to square one. So it's important to rule out that possibility with original installs of OS X and third party programs.
If your problems continue, then it's possibly a problem with third party at boot kernel extension files, (and the catalog problem was yet another one) so to solve this you need to make sure all your third party software is updated and works with your current OS X version.
A trick is, if you get gray screen at boot time, is to hold the Shift Key while booting the computer, this will disable a lot of things and allow you to fix the third party software issue.
What I suggest you do is have multiple backup systems, including hold option key bootable clones, this way if your TM drive gets corrupted you can go back in time to a saved state on the clone, restore that and then your files from the TM drive.
Most commonly used backup methods

Create Boot camp partition on multiple partitions disk without reformatting

Hi everybody,
I am trying to install Windows 7 on a multiple partitions 1TB disk.
Currently I have 2 partitons:
300GB - OS X Lion
700GB - Data
I have read some tips and advices on how to install windows on multiple partitons disks - most of them are invasive (backing up to a removable drive and then reformatting). However, I haven’t found conclusive answer (hence my posting here):
I’m wondering does anybody know in any way - is it possible to do this more painlelssly - to divide second partition (or maybe first) and use that one as a bootcamp target?
Or am I stuck with reformatting to a single partition and then installing from scratch?
Thank you.

No. To use Boot Camp Assistant your drive must start with a single volume encompassing the entire drive - one partition. BCA will then create a second partition for Windows and modify the bootloader so you can select which volume to use for startup - OS X or Windows. BCA can also remove the Windows volume and restore the drive to its original state - single OS X partition.
If you have more than one partition already then BCA cannot modify it. If you have a drive configured with BCA and subsequently add a third partition then BCA is no longer able to manage the drive, and you may no longer be able to boot Windows because of changes made to the bootloader.
So, yes, you are stuck with "reformatting to a single partition and then installing from scratch."
Your alternative is to create however many partitions you want. Install Windows on one of them. Download rEFIt to replace the standard bootloader so you can select between Windows and OS X (or any other OSes you install.)

I have 2T imac running lion Can I re-partition and use one half as a back up disk?

Bought a new mac in November and it is refused to start up yesterday. Spoke with Apple and they said I should make sure I do regular back ups in case I l ose my hard drive?!?! I did a clean install of the Operating software but was advised to erase and install.
I have taken all my important stuff off and can reinstall my programs once I get to the next stage so what I am wondering is
I have 2T imac running lion Can I re-partition and use one half as a back up disk for use with time machine so that I do not have to buy an external HD?
Cheers J

You could partition the drive, I read that Time Machine will work on if you HD partition.
BUT, it will do you no good if you HD fails.
Usually, if a HD fails it's the entire drive that is dead not just a partition.
So your time machine back would be on a dead disk, useless!

Removable disks and multiple catalogs

HI,
I have a new system and I am wondering what my options are to get my images onto the system.
I have the disks from my old system that have about 300 GB of images each. These images are divided by years so that 2 years are on one drive and two years on another.
The new Vista system has a 640 GB drive for data, so I could copy the data from these disks onto the new drive. However, that would leave me with little disk space on the new drive.
I am wondering if I can place the two disks into removable housings and access them as external drives. If I do so I have some questions.
1) Can I stick the images into one catalog that would include images from the 2 external drives and the new 640 GB drive? Are there issues if the external drives are not always present?
2)Or should I create 3 catalogs?
If I so. do the catalogs reside on the external drives, or with Lightroom on an internal drive? I am also concerned about what happens if I disconnect the external drive and remount another drive. No doubt the drive letters would be reused, but the content would not match.
Any suggestions?

As of Mountain Lion what I read says that TimeMachine can have multiple disks to back up to and will write backup data to whatever drives you add to your "pool".
This does not seem to work if any drive is smaller than the dataset you are backing up. That is, apparently TimeMachine wants to put all the data from one machine in one place on one drive and if the drive it is looking at is too small it bails out with an error and tells you to reduce the data set size or get a bigger disk?

Hard disks, partitions and Mac Pro

Hi all,
I'm new to the Mac Pro and am migrating from a Windows environment, I have used a iBook for the past 6 months and this is the reason for totally migrating to a Mac Desktop.
I have spent half a day on browsing the forum here, very confusing I must say but then again I add that I am an absolute a-technical person.
I have a few questions on storage which I hope might get answered here;
My Hardware:
I am about to order a 2,66ghz Mac Pro, 4GB Ram, XP1900 and a 160Gb hard disk will will be replaced as soon as the Mac Pro enters my dwelling.
My Work Environment:
Apart from the basic office things, Internet, Mail and such I will use the mac Pro 90% for Imaging purposes. Most used applications:
- CS2
- Aperture
- Adobe Lightroom
as well as a number of add-ons like HDR programs, Noise programs, RAW converters etc.
I am a Photographer working with Mid-format and Standard format images, which in some case, like when using HDR can reach sizes of well over 150-200Mb per image!
Useually the image size of a 16bit mid-format tiff are around 70MB.
Now for the question, how to configure the best possible HD setup.
I will use WinXP, which I would like to run on a seperate partition/disk
I need a schratch disk for CS2
I need roughly 500GB of intermediate storage for imgaes before the periodically get back-up to external hard disk.
So I was thinking the following, and this only based upon how I used my Win Environment:
150GB Raptor as start-up disk and location for programs and OSX as well as basic documents and files
76GB Raptor as Scratchdisk
500GB as WinXp disk (30%) and rest as storage for Image cataloging system (mainly normal sized Jpegs)
750GB as Image tank
I have the Raptors, but don't have to use them if a better solution comes out. Since I will be using my Win pc until everythink works satisfactory on the Mac...
some remarks:
I have red about raid, both 0 and 1 seem interesting but I will loose out on disk space possibilities, and will be forced to work with external drives again, which I don't like... but if push comes to shove I will do that.
sorry for the information overload, and maybe all points have been answered in other threads before, but whilst browsing through hundreds of threads I couldn't see the forest becasue of the trees anymore.
One last comment, I make my living with photography so a good setup is of vital importance ....
Kindest regards, and many thanks in advance

Hi all,
Hi,
Now for the question, how to configure the best
possible HD setup.
IMO; use a 3 drive RAID 0 for your boot, application, and
data partition - my style would be all in one big partition
and just segragate stuff with folders. I would then add 2
USB or FireWire drives. One for backing up your system
and one for the windows XP if you just have to have windows
running on your MacPro. They don't run at the same time you
know - like on Amiga where MacOS, Windows, and AmigaOS all
multitasked together in shared memory space simultainiously.
As such my opinion is that it's better to keep your WinTel
box on a KBM switch and LAN the two together.
I will use WinXP, which I would like to run on a
seperate partition/disk
I need a schratch disk for CS2
With a 3 drive RAID your disk I/O is between 3 and 20 times
the speed of a single drive setup so separate cache drive
isn't really advantagious. Click on the link below and
scroll down to the Drive Test area:
http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=199338&doc2=195252
Both are my profiles. One with a single drive, and one
with a 3-drive raid. No other differences.
I need roughly 500GB of intermediate storage for
imgaes before the periodically get back-up to
external hard disk.
So I was thinking the following, and this only based
upon how I used my Win Environment:
150GB Raptor as start-up disk and location for
programs and OSX as well as basic documents and
files
76GB Raptor as Scratchdisk
500GB as WinXp disk (30%) and rest as storage for
Image cataloging system (mainly normal sized Jpegs)
750GB as Image tank
I have the Raptors, but don't have to use them if a
better solution comes out. Since I will be using my
Win pc until everythink works satisfactory on the
Mac...
IMO the Raptors are overpriced. If it were me I would sell
them. I think the two together will pay for all three 320
or 300 gig RAID drives. I did some research regarding which
drives are good in a Mac RAID environment and I ended up
going for the the MaxLine Maxtor drives (even though I hate
Maxtor usually). So far I'm very happy with them and the
fact that they are like one of the most inexpensive drives
you can get didn't hurt either.
I think that if a person REALLY needs the speed offered by
Raptor drives and is willing to pay the difference for it
then they should just get a dedicated RAID card which offers
even more of a speed increase!!!
some remarks:
I have red about raid, both 0 and 1 seem interesting
but I will loose out on disk space possibilities, and
will be forced to work with external drives again,
which I don't like... but if push comes to shove I
will do that.
You don't lose any space if you use just RAID 0. If there
are three 300gig HDs that format individually to 260gig
each then in a RAID 0 configuration you would have 780gigs.

Swap Partitioning and multiple disks

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