The fact that you mention you are using partitions on disks that possibly have other partions doing other things, means raw performance will be compromised anyway.
with normal unraided swap (partition or file), swapouts are not a performance problem, since they're lazy, relatively cheap, cpu-wise, and not likely to be voluminous. if you ever have more than a trivial number of swapins, you'll be crawling; this is merely a crutch until you can fix your memory problem. swap over raid5 is somewhat opposed to this: the swapouts now start eating more CPU. but non-degraded raid5 swapins run like an N-1 disk raid0.
(mostly reads). In this light it actually might be better to keep the swap in a file on my raid10 (-p n3) which occupies most of these 4 drives, and hope that the md code will be able to distribute the io across idle drives. Does this sound about right?
yes. especially better than the absurd way some installers insist on putting swap partitions at the slow/distant tail of the disk...
but if you're planning to actually _use_ swap, you should probably start over, planning more memory instead.
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