[K12OSN] Hard Drive Conundrum

[Liam Marshall]

I am contemplating a hard drive switch.  Here is the current configuration

cheap 2 gb ide drive primary master with /boot residing on it
cheap 52x cdrom secondary master

Adaptec 2940U2/UW scsi controller

cheap old and slow seagate ST318418N  7200 rpm 18 gb scsi drive  
identified as sda with /home    /opt   and the swap on it

cheap old and slow ibm DDRs-3913OD 7200 rpm with /root and all else 
linux on it

K12LTSP 4.0? on it.  (haven't gone to 4.1 during the school year out of 
fear of losing all that is currently setup on it ie users, software etc.)

I want to explore different had drives to get more storage space and 
speed.  before I can do that however I need to know a few things

1.  I thought putting /home /opt and /swap on a different drive was a 
good thing, performance wise.  Was I wrong?  should I try to keep 
everything on one drive or keep things separate?  would I lose 
performance, in otherwords, if I get a single, larger drive to replace 
the 2 I currently use?

2.  How would I go about copying the drive's partitions to the new 
drive(s)  as the partitions are currently separated across multiple 
drives I can't just clone the drives, which I know how to do in the 
windoze world but not in linux anyway.

3.  I am wondering whether to stick with scsi or go EIDE.  I am assuming 
that if I get even EIDE drives with a much higher rpm speed than my slow 
scsi drives that I will see something of a performance increase, even if 
I am "downgrading" to EIDE from scsi?

4.  can I do some form of raid with EIDE?  I assume I would need a 
controller card for this.



help greatly appreciated