On Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 11:18:33AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 05 February 2006 10:53, Ian Turner wrote:
> >On Sunday 05 February 2006 10:40 am, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> >> AFAIK I recommended to use separate disks for vtapes and
> >> holdingdisk.
> >
> >Why even use a holding disk at all with vtapes? It's not like you're
> > going to keep the hard disk streaming.
> 
> In order to allow better scheduling and somewhat reduced fragmentation 
> of the vtapes disk over time.  If it can stuff it all onto the holding 
> area which amanda will do if its of sufficient size and allowed, then 
> the following copy does it all on one stream, and in sequential order, 
> up cable0 and down cable1 in my case.
> 
> Without the holding area, its possible amanda could be hammering several 
> files at once to the vtape drive, thrashing its seeking mechanism 
> excessively.  Or it might even revert to one dump at a time as it would 
> when going direct to tape with no holding disk, and that would be 
> noticeably slow.  I'm probably lucky as I put the holding disk 
> directory on /, and / usually has well over 25GB free here.  I don't 
> think its ever used more than 5GB of it though.
> 
Intersting, I never considered putting the dumpdisk on the root disk,
I've always dedicated a physical spindle to it. But, on a machine that
is dedicated to Amanda, using / sounds like a good idea.

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