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Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 18:49:22 -0800 (PST)
From: Steve Reid <steve@edmweb.com>
To: Kory Hamzeh <kory@avatar.com>
cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Are 2 drives better than 1?
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> I'm trying to put a high performance freebsd system together and I have a 
> question. Would it be faster to have 2 scsi drives, one for root, swap, 
> and /usr and the other for /home, or 1 drive and put everything one it?

All other things being equal, multiple drives are certainly faster than a
single drive. 

With two drives, you can make two accesses (almost?) simultaneously,
whereas with one drive you have to wait for the read head to finish
accessing the first file before it can move to read the second file. The
more drives the better, provided you can split up your directory structure
appropriately. 

You could even use ccd so that the filesystem is automatically and
transparently split evenly between the disks, but that kinda puts all your
eggs in one basket.