Format whole drive vs. partition

[Lonni J Friedman]

On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Michael Hipp <michael at redmule.com> wrote:
> On 12/29/2012 12:53 PM, Dan Martin wrote:
>> In that case, my only concern would be the lack of
>> a swap partition on the secondary drive.  But, like what prompted
>> your original question, this is something that I've read, but that I don't
>> really understand--that is, how/why would a swap partition on each
>> physical drive improve performance.
>
> It's not something I ever give much thought to as my little systems basically
> never use much swap, but...
>
> If you're using a lot of swap, having it spread across more spindles/channels
> could certainly speed things up, but it would be usage dependent. I'd think
> swap should be on the least busy drive which often would be the primary root
> drive, not the bulk data drives.
>
> But having swap spread around to more drives also makes it prone to more
> failures, so I'd be careful of that.

If you're using a lot of swap, then I'd say that disk partitioning
strategies are the least of your problems.