[CentOS] Minimising disk I/O

[Keith Roberts]

I've added a second IDE card to my system on the PCI bus, 
and added a small HDD on the Primary Master port for that 
IDE card.

This drive shows up using the Gparted live CD as /dev/hde
Which sounds about right.

The other drives show up as /dev/hda (Primary Master) and 
/dev/hdc (Secondary Master). /dev/hdb is an empty removable 
drive caddy (Primary Slave) and /dev/hdd (Seconday Slave) is 
the DVD-RW drive.

So I now have a maximum of 8 IDE ports - 4 on the IDE 
controller built into the motherboard (which BTW are all 
A-OK), and 4 on the IDE-PCI addon card.

Vivard on the Ultimate Boot CD recognises the /dev/hde 
drive, as being on the PCI controller.

I was also able to format the 2GB Samsung drive on /dev/hde 
as linux-swap using Gparted.

The largest spare drive I have is ~7 GB, which might be 
enough for a linux-swap partition, and a /var/log partition.

The idea is to have any logging and other intensive disk I/O 
on a spare disk drive, so as not wake up the main hard drive 
with the Linux root partition on it.

I just want to write any 'disposable data' to a spare 
hard disk drive, and keep this seperated from stuff on my 
main root partition/linux installation.

Kind Regards,

Keith Roberts

-- 
In theory, theory and practice are the same;
in practice they are not.

This email was sent from my laptop with Centos 5.5