[NTLUG:Discuss] Homemade machine locking up at swap

[gin]

I recently built a 128 MB Celeron 500 with a 6 Gig drive. It has a 
SuperMicro motherboard. Everything went fine. I built another one, but used 
a 20 Gig drive. It doesn't work quite right. From my estimation, it locks 
the moment it has to page memory out. This was brought to my attention when 
I compiled MySQL. There is a point at which memory becomes scarce upon 
compiling a file called "sql_lyacc.cc." The little machine (6 Gig) does it 
fine (takes a while - 30 sec or so). The 20 Gig machine locks. I have 128 
MB swap partitions on both.

The hard drive is on the primary IDE controller, while the CDROM is on the 
secondary (because the machine has a 2U chassis and the hard drive is too 
far away from the CDROM to use the same IDE cable, and Radio Shack only had 
IDE cables, not extensions so I took what I could get). It seems like it is 
the hard drive. But what?

Anyone have any suggestions? Is the hard drive just too slow?