Dusting off an old drive to use as swap
Every once in a while I dig up old drives that seem to still work (although all drives will fail eventually, right?). Today I’ve got a Fujitsu MPA3035AT 3.5GB IDE drive that I’m going to partition and use for swap for all my (planned) Linux partitions. I found a Fujitsu obsolete product information page for the series it is from even.
I remember reading somewhere that the ideal space for a swap partition is no greater than 1.5x the system memory. Right now that means I’ll dedicate 1.5GB to the swap partition.
I’ve been debating with myself about what to use the remaining ~2GB for. I thought about using it as a small, unreliable backup space for my USB flash drive (which is actually 4GB); or using it as backup for other crucial hard disk data. Today I realized that it might be the perfect space for an installation of Puppy Linux. I’ve been using a derivative of Puppy known as Muppy from a CD off and on for quite a while. It has saved me many headaches in the past.
Now it’s just a matter of turning off the PC and getting on my hands and knees to do the actual hardware installation.