Swap file drive question

I am thinking of getting a seperate drive for my swap file. People here seem to think its worth putting it on a seperate drive (though, not worth putting it on a seperate partition). What if the swap file drive is slower than the system drive? My OS will be on a nice scsi drive (15k) and I could either put the virtual mem on my 80gig WD special edition drive (on its own partition) or put it on a small scsi drive that wouldnt be as fast as the system one (perhaps a small 10k), is it worth it to get the extra drive or should I just put it on the WD? Thanks!

no, not worth in my opinion; unless you really need the additional space. the problem with having it in the same disk is that performance will slow down quite a bit when processing both the swap file and the regular disk tasks at the same time. your scsi disk shouldnt slow down dramatically but you may still get some improvement from allocating the swap file onto the other WD disk, preferrably in the very first partition.

what about putting it on a seperate scsi drive (one for OS and one for swap), compared to having an OS scsi drive and swap on first WD partition?

I'd agree with Jkasmann, provided you're using a U160 or better controller. Two drives will not saturate a U160 bus and it'll leave the IDE controllers open for optical and bulk storage drives. 10K will be fast enough to keep up with the OS without any major issues. Try to get as small a drive as possible, I've got 4.5GB 10Ks I use for similar purposes.

Its definetly u160, so if I see a cheap small 10k drive ill grab it.