2016-09-01 10:23 GMT+03:00 Frank Steinmetzger <war...@gmx.de>: > On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 08:13:23AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote: > >> it will take about 5 seconds to partition it. >> And a few more to mkfs it. >> >> Are you sure you aren't thinking of mkfs with ext2 (which did take hours >> for a drive that size? > > Some people do a full systems check (i.e. badblocks) before entrusting a > drive with anything important.
It is a good advice! I have already thought of this but I am sorry to acknowledge that, since the "old good times" of MS DOS 6.22, I never did this in Linux. :( And except for one 2.5" disk failure on my old laptop about 7 years ago, I had no problem with this so far. :) All other my hard disks work for about 10 years without any intervention from my side and even without any backups so far. That's why I started to think about it now. :) So, can you, please, advice me about the program or utility that can do badblocks check for me? >> > Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive >> > into smaller logical ones and why? >> >> The only reason to partition a drive is to get 2 or more >> smaller ones that differ somehow (size, inode ratio, mount options, etc) > > If you want to do backups, then of course the file system is important, so > it retains permissions and stuff. Your ext4 choice is the right one in that > case. However, I partitioned by backupdrive into two partitions, so the one > with the sensitive data can be encrypted. The big partition that holds media > files has not got that treatment. It is, again, a good advice but, again, returning to the "old good times" of MS DOS 6.22, I do remember that working then on 40MB (yes, megabytes) hard drive I used some program that compressed all the data before saving them on that hard drive. Unfortunately, one day, because of the corruption, I lost all the data on that hard drive. Since then, I am very much afraid of compressed or encrypted hard drives. >> Go with no partition table by all means, but if you one day find you >> need one, you will have to copy all your data off, repartition, and copy >> your data back. > > When I do the mentioned partitioning scheme, I put the biggest partition at > the beginning of the drive and the smaller one(s) at the back. That way, > should I ever actually need to resize a partition, I only have to export the > smaller partition for the process (or none at all, if it’s just a backup > itself and I have another backup on another drive). > Of course there’s LVM these days, but up until recently, I used NTFS for the > media partition so I could also read it in $DUMB_OS, which doesn’t know LVM. > Only a short while back, I also switched to ext4 for that, so I can retain > file names with : and ? in them. But I still refrained from using LVM, > though. I am afraid of LVM because of the same reason I described above. > Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’ > ’ve been using vi for 15 years, because I don’t know with which command > to close it. :)
