3B1 Expansions - where'd they all go?

[Steve Simmons]

In article <635 at shade.UUCP> steveb at shade.Ann-Arbor.MI.US (Steve Barber) writes:
>This summer it looks like I'll be looking to add another drive to
>my system, and I've noticed that all the talk about this kind of thing
>has died down.  I have a few questions anyway . . .

>3) How slow is slow?  I.e. if I opt for a slow (say 40ms) 2nd drive onto
>   which I would probably place /usr/spool, whatever source code I keep
>   online, and other misc. stuff that's not speed-critical it shouldn't
>   be too big of a deal.  But if I were compiling on that drive, what
>   kind of an impact on speed would I see?

I had one of the original 20Mb hard drives in lokkur, and upgraded it
to a 28ms drive.  Amazing improvement in performance when system load
was heavy (had 1Mb ram at the time).  Even during unloaded conditions,
disk-intensive things like expire or compiling had tremendous improvements.

>4) What about faster drives?  Would I notice a big speed difference if I
>   installed an ~18-~20 second drive as my root drive and moved my present
>   Miniscribe 6085 (28ms) to the 2nd drive position?  Is the 3b1 fast enough
>   to make good use of a drive that fast?  I do use the system pretty hard.
>   I realize that access time probably isn't that relavant to this question,
>   whereas transfer rate probably would be, but I'm just checking.

Three disk areas get beat on primarily: swap, /tmp, and /usr/tmp.  If you
can somehow get all three on the fast drive you'll probably get the best
performance.  Seek time isn't an issue.  Theoretically transfer rate might
be, but so far I've seen no-one run into a problem.

   Steve Simmons         Just another midwestern boy
   scs at vax3.iti.org  -- or -- ...!sharkey!itivax!scs
         "Hey...you *can* get here from here!"