What drive should I install linux on?
 

I recently installed a new 200GB drive, so I now have some extra storage space to play with. I've decided to install linux and I have a few different options that I wanted to run by you guys first.

First, here's my IDE setup:
First(primary?) IDE cable:
Master: 60GB - Windows XP/Installed Programs
Slave: 200GB - General File Storage
Second IDE cable:
Master: 40GB
Slave: DVD-RW Drive

I've always been told that a HD will run slower if it's on the same IDE cable as a CD/DVD drive. How slow are we talking? Because I would like to install linux on the 40GB drive, but not if my (slow) HD is going to be a problem. If it is, I will create a small partition on my 200GB drive for linux and use the 40GB drive as a misc storage drive.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks

First decide What OS will be your primary OS. What OS do you think you will need the most space for? If you play a lot of games then use the big 200 gig as your windows disk cause you will need more space for your windows games.
I cant quantify how much slower the hdd will get if you are sharing it with another device, but I guess this would only happen if you were accessing the cd-rom at the same time. Also do you really need 3 hdds? why not just use the 200gig for windows and the 60gig for linux. Wouldnt the slow down also happen if you are accessing 2 hdds simultaneously which are connected to the same cable?

I rarely play games. I want to use the 200gig for storage (mp3s, movies, installation files, etc). 60gigs is more than enough space for Windows XP + Installed programs.

I would like to install linux on the 40gig, but if the general consensus is that I would be better off putting it on a partition on my 200gb, i'll do that.

Thanks for your response, maul.

Just leave the 200gig as pure storage for both Operating Systems. Put Windows on the 60gb and put Linux on the 40gb.

That will be fine. The 40gb harddrive's performance will only be slightly less when you are using the 40gb drive and DVD-RW at the same time.

Because an IDE bus can only handle one request/response at a time, any request to any target ties up that channel until the target responds. The difference with optical drives is that their response time is much slower than hard drives. Drivers and apps can use asynchronous techniques to minimize spin up and seek blocking but without a huge cache they'll never match the response times of hard drives.

In other words, it'll only be an issue when you're actually USING the optical drive. It's not like the drive will just simply BE SLOWER because it's sharing an IDE line with the CD-ROM.

I'd put Linux on the 40gb unless you think you'll be using the CD a lot (frankly, after install, I almost never touch my CD drive). You could also partition the 200gb to have say 20gb for a ext3 partition for Linux and the rest a ntfs partition for file storage. 20gb ought to be an ample plenty, with the rest available for big file storage.

How does this work for a dual-boot system if that partition is NTFS (like my setup)? If I understand correctly, it isn't possible to (safely) write to an NTFS partition under Linux. Ideally I would have another file server machine running Samba, but that isn't currently feasible. This little conundrum means I can basically only use BitTorrent under Windows (or Linux if I had made the 200GB media drive ext3 or something non-NTFS.) Am I correct in thinking there isn't a viable solution to this other than making the NTFS partition a VFAT one instead?

Right, generally. Apologies for not being clear.

Ill-behaved drivers, packet writers, and status checkers exist that can cause the performance issues by polling the drive at intervals even if it isn't being played/accessed intentionally. Simply leaving a CD/DVD in the drive can be enough to cause it. If the light flickers intermittently assume something's being nosey.

This is one place where using analog audio playback is beneficial. Instead of tying up the IDE channel and some portion of your I/O system moving music bits, once the drive receives the play command it just continues with the analog cable passing signals directly to the audio hardware. Not that we use the things this way too often anymore...

Yep. Simplicity. If you get into performance tuning then you'll want to move parts to different spindles. That complicates things though, especially if you'll be reinstalling or moving drives around. Keep it simple until that's of interest.

I use the server route since that's how I've thought for too long. These days there exist several ext2/ext3 drivers for Windows. I never moved beyond experimental releases but for a dual-boot machine like you describe that's the direction I'd explore. Hopefully others here have more current experience on the best solution.

Linux drivers that write to NTFS have been experimental for a long time but they seem to work fine. Some people report problems when writing small files to windows. Why not just use the Linux partition to store "Linux" specific files so the partition dosent have to be too big. For all other files (songs, movies etc) you can store them in a windows partition and mount that partition in Linux. Linux can read flawlessly from NTFS

I was not saying to format the 200gig drive as a Fat32/NTFS filesystem, that was assumed by you. You can make this ext2/3 as crynel said, or NFS, or whatever. There are filesystems that both Windows and Linux can read/write to flawlessly. This drive should be formatted as such.

Yeah, these Ext2 drivers for Windows seem to work pretty well--the author does claim the "level of sophistication of the Ext2 file system driver's implementation is indeed comparable to Windows NT's native file system drivers"--but I tend to trust the Linux side of things more. After looking into it a bit, the consensus filesystem for a shared media partition on a dual-boot system seems to be VFAT. In spite of some of the advantages of NTFS being lost, one doesn't have to mess with non-native drivers under Windows and Linux support for it is very solid.

Thanks for the responses guys. I installed Ubuntu on the 40gb and haven't had any problems with it. I'll be sure to keep the drive empty (it usually is) when I'm working in linux.

I'll have to look into other file systems later. At this point, I'm okay with just having read access to my NTFS drives, but it would be something worth looking into later.