Is bin ever written to?

[Smoot Carl-Mitchell]

On Wed, 2008-12-24 at 00:10 +0100, Knapp wrote:

> I just got a new drive, I have 2 drives now. One has home and the
> other has the rest. Are you saying that RAID would make it even
> faster? Would that work when one is a bit older and smaller? They are
> both by the same company.

You cannot do much with 2 drives except RAID1 which is a simple mirror.
That actually slows down write requests (it has to write the data
twice), but speeds read requests, since there is two disk heads.  If
they are on the same controller, then any speed increase depends on how
capable the controller is - can it do concurrent seek operations?  Since
your drives are not the same size, you would only be able to mirror the
capacity of the smaller drive.

You could do RAID0 which would stripe the data between the two drives
which would speed read access, but I would not recommend that.  If you
lose one drive, you lose all your data. You could also concatenate the
two drives together into one big "virtual" drive, but you would have the
same failure issues as with RAID0.

I do not think you are going to gain much performance beyond
splitting /home out on the 2nd drive. 
-- 
Smoot Carl-Mitchell
System/Network Architect
smoot at tic.com
+1 480 922 7313
cell: +1 602 421 9005