Old HDD as swap file?

[Awatef]

I have an old HDD with 4GB. I installed it as slave on IDE1, removed the swap file on the master HDD, and defined one on the old HDD with a fixed size of 3500MB.

Is this alright or is there anything I can improve?

[shakey]

You could set it to a variable size, eg starting at 1gb, with a max size of 3.5gig. I think this will improve performance when not much swap is being used, as a smaller swap is easier for windows to manage.

Th only other think i can think is if you have a raid controller and a second spare hd to use as swap :P

[Blue_MiSfit]

I would avoid it, because swap is highly dependent on seek times. Old IDE hard drives have poor seek times.

An old SCSI driver on the other hand would be an ideal candidate :)

~MiSfit

[Shinigami-Sama]

Install *nix and use a removable drive as swap?
I did that on my solaris workstation once

but I agree old SCSI drives are cheap, so are SATA

[setarip_old]

@Awatef

Hi!Is this alrightyes, it should work for you...

[check]

Because swap drives need all the speed they can get, I make a point of always partitioning 5gb or so of space at the end of the fastest drive I have and using that for swap.

[Awatef]

@ shakey
Unfortunately, I can install only 2 HDDs in my case.

@ Blue
Well, I have this one and an even older 2GB one, no SCSI models :(
But your remark made me wanna bench the HDD w/ HD Tune, and the results were disastrous!!
If the main HDD has 13.1ms seek time and 46.1MB/s transfer rate, the old HDD made it to 15.9ms and 8.5MB/s transfer rate only! :(
Guess this is only slowing down my system then, right?

[Blue_MiSfit]

That was indeed my worst ph34r. :)

Use a recent hard drive, or get a cheap SCSI drive and controller on eBay. 9gig 10,000 rpm drives are like $20, and a controller isnt much more. Only downside would be the noise..

~Misfit