[K12OSN] Hard Drive Conundrum

[Liam Marshall]

Liam Marshall wrote:

> 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
>
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>
I also need a ide raid controller recommendation that we know works with 
linux.

correct me if I am wrong but most should as the raid work is done before 
linux is involved, right?  I mean, I played with a cheap dell system 
that had a 2 drive ide configuration attached to a raid controller card 
and during the installation of K12LTSP 4.0 it detected only 1 drive