Hmm, if you happen to have a fast hard drive available, that's a good idea. But, if you have to buy it, wouldn't a better choice be to buy more RAM instead of another hard drive?Bruce B wrote:....Just talking shop here. If you anticipate a lot of swap partition activity, my idea is to put the swap partition on another drive of equal or greater speed, if you have one.
The reason why is the read write heads have to move all over the place when doing a lot of swapping and reading and writing on the operating system partition also.
If the swap partition is on another drive the heads (and the entire drive) can stay focused on the task at hand which is reading and writing the swap partition.....
(Assuming your computer can handle more RAM,) one Gig of RAM is comparable in cost to the cheapest hard drive, these days, and would beat even the fastest hard drive used for swap (virtual RAM) memory. It is also far more rugged, reliable, smaller and lighter. There seems to be a puzzling lack of data on RAM power consumption, but, based on how hot a 1GB stick of 400 MHz DDR RAM gets, compared to how much heat my hard drive puts out, I'm pretty sure that 1GB of any kind of RAM would use a good deal less power than a fast hard drive.
Not to knock your idea, just to point out some other considerations.