On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 01:22:39PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
2 TB HD
as Russell suggested, a RAID-1 array is better/safer. but if you don't need the extra terabyte of storage, 2x2TB drives is a lot cheaper than the 2x3TB drives he suggested.
i'll also agree with Russell's suggestion about using an SSD for the operating system. it'll boot faster, and both loading apps and apt-get upgrades will be faster. also, swapping to SSD is faster than swapping to mechanical disks - the ideal is to avoid swapping entirely, but sometimes it's unavoidable (or even desirable - why waste actual RAM on code that's not being executed when it can be swapped out). i've taken to using zram as my primary swap device in recent months - it's essentially a compressed ramdisk block device, and it's a lot faster than swapping to SSD or mechanical disk. I also have a lower-priority swap partition on SSD. like tmpfs, zram doesn't actually use any RAM unless there's data swapped to it. so you can allocate, e.g., 4GB out of 8GB RAM to zram without worrying about wasting memory. i can't remember what kernel version first got zram but it's definitely in 3.4 and later kernels. i'm pretty sure it's in 3.2 kernels too. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>