IDE -- mount partitions for better performance

[illoai at gmail.com]

On 14 March 2011 20:00,  <freebsd_user at guice.ath.cx> wrote:
> freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>
> Guidance with the following:
>
> We are limited to Support for ATA-100/66/33 IDE and ATAPI compliant
> devices.  With that said, we have our atapi/33 optical on a add in
> controller (PCI) and are seeking to place four HDD’s on the main boards
> controllers.  Our dilemma is where to place /, /tmp, /usr and /var from a
> performance standpoint.  We understand that /var  does quite a bit of
> writing and probably should go on the master hdd, but what about the /usr,
> /tmp and root?  Hell, I’m not sure my thinking is sane as to where I
> ‘think’ /var should be placed/mounted.
>

It depends on very many things.  tmpfs(5) has been extremely stable
for me, definitely safe enough for /tmp.  Make sure you have plenty of
swap, though.

If the bits in /var aren't life or death (or at least production mail-server)
you can get by with it being mounted on a volatile filesystem (like tmpfs
or mdmfs) and backed up occasionally (via cron or similar).  If you
absolutely can't afford to lose even 5 minutes of /var's past you'd be
better off mirroring.

I generally put / & /usr on the same disk, they're reasonably small &
written to very little, if you symlink /usr/obj, /usr/src, & /usr/ports.

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