Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition

Multiple Hard Drives

Disk input/output is usually the slowest part of a computer. If you have more than one hard drive, you can use those drives to accelerate your system performance.

First, make sure that each drive is on its own port. SCSI and SATA drives usually accommodate one drive per port (unless you specifically use a port multiplier), but IDE drives usually attach two devices per port. Each port has a maximum throughput. It does no good to attach two fast drives to one port, as the drives compete for the one port’s throughput.

In general, when you have multiple drives, you want to split the read and write activity between the drives. I usually put the data I’m serving on one disk and the important system files on another. If I’m building ...