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From: louie@sayshell.umd.edu (Louis A. Mamakos)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Build an external disk as boot disk with 2.0
Message-ID: <1991Feb10.040743.13703@ni.umd.edu>
Date: 10 Feb 91 04:07:43 GMT
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There is a big win under some circumstances in setting up the internal
105MB drive to have the swapfile on it even if you have a large external
SCSI drive.  

Consider that you have loaded the root and boot from the external
drive, and that you are swapping/paging to the internal drive.  When
you get to the point where you run out of physical memory and start to
page (not too hard with an 8MB system), you'll want to spread that
paging activity across as many different disk arms as possible.  With
the configuration described, the pure text pages will swap directly
from the file it was invoked from on external disk, while data pages
will be read and written to the internal drive.  When you beging to
get low on memory, this will cause the I/O to be split between two
different drives and reduce the head movement on the external drive.

The fact that the internal 105MB drive is fairly zippy only makes this
scenario more attractive.

louie