Arch Linux

switch86

Member

Registered: 2008-08-25

Posts: 24

LVM questions regarding performance

Over the holidays, I'll be redoing my server (running Arch) using LVM.  The situation is this: I have two internal HDDs (80GB apiece) on the IDE bus, and an external USB2.0 drive sitting around not being used. The current install is also partitioned in such a way that there are some partitions that are nearly empty. So naturally I want to put things into a big volume group so that I'm not wasting space, full well knowing that there may be a slight performance hit (that I can justifiy).

I'll probably do it this way, using /boot because of the legacy GRUB limitation, with swaps outside of the LVM to make sure they're contiguous:

/dev/sda1     /boot
/dev/sda2     swap 1
/dev/sda3     LVM partition #1

/dev/sdb1     swap 2
/dev/sdb2     LVM partition #2

/dev/sdc1     LVM partition #3

Anyway, my questions are these:

1) Do certain filesystems perform better when housed on volume groups?
2) As the two internal IDE drives are faster than the external, I would like to "prioritize" those two logical volume partitions. Is it possible to do this?

I know they seem like simple questions. I've searched, but can't come up with anything searching the obvious search strings. So sorry if I'm overlooking something.