2016-09-01 14:55 GMT+03:00 Rich Freeman <[email protected]>: > On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:04 AM, gevisz <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive >> into smaller logical ones and why? >> > > Assuming this is only used on Linux machines (you mentioned moving > files around), here is what I would do: > > 1. Definitely create a partition table. Yes, I know some like to > stick filesystems on raw drives, but you're basically going to fight > all the automation in existence if you do this.
I will do it with gparted and guess that it will create a partition table for me anyway. > 2. Set it up as an LVM partition. Unless you're using filesystems > like zfs/btrfs that have their own way of doing volume management, > this just makes things less painful down the road. > > 3. I'd probably just set it up as one big logical volume, unless you > know you don't need all the space and you think you might use it for > something else later. You can change your mind on this with ext4+lvm > either way, but better to start out whichever way seems best. I had to refresh my memory about LVM before replying to you but still can not see why I may need LVM on an external hard drive... > It will take you all of 30 seconds to format this, unless you're > running badblocks (which almost nobody does, because... it takes too much time? I currently running a smart test on it, and it promised to take 10 hours to complete... > You seem to be concerned about losing data. You should be. This is a > physical storage device. You WILL lose everything stored on it at > some point in time. Last time, I have managed to restore all the data from my 2.5" hard drive that suddenly died about 7 years ago and hope to do it again if any. :) > You mitigate this by one or more of: > 1. Not storing anything you mind losing on the drive, and then not > complaining when you lose it. > 2. Keeping backups, preferably at a different physical location, > using a periodically tested recovery methodology. > 3. Availability solutions like RAID (not the same as a backup, but it > will mean less downtime WHEN you WILL have a drive failure). Some > filesystems like zfs/btrfs have specific ways of achieving this (and > are generally more resistant to unreliable storage devices, which all > storage devices are). > > I've actually had LVM eat my data once due to some kind of really rare > bug (found one discussion of similar issues on some forum somewhere). Aha! > That isn't a good reason not to use LVM. Wanting to plug the drive > into a bunch of Windows machines would be a good reason not to use > LVM, or ext4 for that matter. > > Most of the historic reasons for not having large volumes had to do > with addressing limits, whether it be drive geometry limits, > filesystem limits, etc. Modern partition tables like GPT and > filesystems can handle volumes MUCH larger than 5TB. > > Most modern journaling filesystems should also tend to avoid failure > modes like losing the entire filesystem during a power failure (when > correctly used, heaven help you if you follow a random friend's advice > with mount options, like not using at least ordered data or disabling > barriers). But, bugs can exist, which is a big reason to have backups > and not just trust your filesystem unless you don't care much about > the data. Thank you for replying.
