2nd harddrive for swap file - good idea?

[ahartman]

I've got an old 2-gig harddrive sitting on my desk from my previous computer. I was thinking of throwing this into the new 'puter and making the entire thing a dedicated swap file.

Would that help or hurt performance? It's an older Quantam, I believe - certainly not a 7200 rpm drive (neither is my main HD).

IDE1 -> HD (master); DVD-ROM (slave)
IDE2 -> CD-RW (master); no slave

I'll post more info if necessary.

Thanks in advance!

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[CHHAS]

Well, since you have a free slot on your second IDE controller, by all means, plug it in !

Depending on the drive's age, and it appears to be quite old, I doubt that you will gain performance by using it as a swapfile, you'll probably slow the system down.

What I would use it for is to store word documents, mails, downloaded files, and other stuff you'll hate to loose, so if (when, you are using Windows, remember ) you ever get a f**ked up HD, your files will be safe on another drive, or you could just use it to back up the same files, or ... or ... or ...

Anyway, if it's just lying about, why not put it to use ?

(actually, my 10 GB drive is stashed in my closet at the moment, while I try to decide whether or not to buy a UDMA66 controller, as I'm all out of IDE slots at the moment )


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P3 500, 224 MB ram, G400 16SH,
Maxtor DM 40+ 30GB, IBM Deskstar 16GP 10GB, Maxtor 4320 13 GB
SB Live Value

[Jorden]

Andy, why not do a little swapping around, so that the 2Gb hdd is as slave behind your present harddrive, and the DVD behind your CD-RW.

Why? Well, if you want to make a certain CD-RW without being there, you can have all the image files on the 2Gb drive, burning it onto the CD-RW, without a problem.

If you were to put your swapfile-drive behind your CD-RW, and you would burn a CD, what do you think of the odds that you'd end up with alot of coasters?

By moving the 2Gb drive as slave behing your master drive, you could put a swapfile onto it (1.5 times your physical RAM is enough for Win98) and leave the rest open for making the image file for your CDs on. (You'd need to format it every time, but does that matter??)

This way your burning program reads what it needs from the DVD (I suppose?) without a problem and copy it onto the 2Gb drive. When all is copied, it will read without much interruption from your 2Gb image drive and burn uniterrupted to the CD-RW.

I may be wrong on this, but I think it's the better solution !!

Jorden.

[CHHAS]

Good point Jorden.

Still, if the 2GB drive is a lot slower than the primary drive, it will hurt the performance, rather than improve it.

ahartman: try to set it up as swap drive, if you can tell the difference, good for you
it all comes down to how much slower than your primary drive it is.

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P3 500, 224 MB ram, G400 16SH,
Maxtor DM 40+ 30GB, IBM Deskstar 16GP 10GB, Maxtor 4320 13 GB
SB Live Value

[SCompRacer]

CHHAS is right. Is the older drive UDMA? Correct me if I am wrong, but if you mix the two on one IDE channel, including CD ROM drives, you slow the other drive.


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[This message has been edited by SCompRacer (edited 07 April 2000).]

[Greebe]

Scomp is right if you mix them it'll slow down the other and... I have my Celeron system setup like what you're describing... but I wouldn't suggest using the whole drive and if it's not UDMA33 (guessing here, like the other) there wouldn't be a benefit.

[ahartman]

Thanks for the options! I'll tear into things this weekend. I have the DVD & RW on different channels as I thought it would be faster on CD to CD copies - I didn't take the extra time to make an image of the CD.

Once installed, I'll do some tests to determine where the swap file should go. Would it be faster on its own partition or doesn't that matter?

Do HD benchmark pgms work on all HDs or do I need one specifically from my HD maker?

At the very least, I'll get 2gig to use for moving MP3s off my main drive so my backups stay at a reasonable size...

Jorden (notice the spelling... ), if I put the DVD behind my RW, won't that make the RW my primary CD? The DVD is faster for reads than my RW and I've heard of games that require use of the first CD to work.

Thanks again everyone, for the help!

[CHHAS]

I recall being told at some point that the swapfile should be on 'the most used partition, on the least used drive'.

This, I believe, is because of the FAT table having the highest probability of being loaded in cache on the most used partition, and putting it on the least used drive should interfere the least with other disk access.

Of course, disk speed is the major factor here, but if you put the swap file on the 'old' harddisk, I will suggest you make 1 large partition, and install the drive on the second IDE controller, in order to let the system access both drive at the same time (as only 1 drive per channel can be active at the same time).

As for disk benchmark programs, I like Winbench 99, which can (or could) be downloaded from ZD's website.

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P3 500, 224 MB ram, G400 16SH,
Maxtor DM 40+ 30GB, IBM Deskstar 16GP 10GB, Maxtor 4320 13 GB
SB Live Value

[This message has been edited by CHHAS (edited 07 April 2000).]