On Sat, 4 Aug 2001 23:27, Tom Brinkman wrote:
> On Saturday 04 August 2001 12:29 am, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> > Having one partition is like putting all your eggs in one basket. If
> > / fails, then you lose all your user /home data as well. Also, a
> > multiple partition setup can speed up disc accesses, particularly on
> > larger drives such as yours.
>
> I believe this is the key. On 8gig and smaller drives I've always
> installed Linux in one big / partition. Now that I've got 37 gigs for
> Linux, I use / and /home plus another 2 storage partitions.
>
> The advantage to using one big / on smaller drives is that you only
> havt'a worry about total space remaining, rather than not having enough
> in /, /home, and others. Specially if you have room (eg, on a Windoze
> drive) to bakup /home to.
Very true. My total GNU/Linux space is just under 10GB, so I would be really
pressed for space if I had more than one partition. If I had more space, I
would've made two or three partitions.
I'm curious: might LVM be an option for a multiple partition setup? That way,
you can have multiple partitions instead of one overly large partition
(filesystems tend to become slower as they get larger). That could give you a
combination of both speed (multiple smaller partitions) and extra space
(space is not reserved for certain directories). One problem I could
anticipate would be that there is no clear partitional division between
directories like /, /usr, /tmp, /var and /home, which wouldn't be much better
than one single partition. For a system with few users (e.g. a home system),
however, this setup could be great. Filesystem speed and space could be
optimised. With only few users, the drive wouldn't be under enough stress to
make failure very likely (it isn't a server), so directories wouldn't really
need to be on different partitions.
Note that I am not proposing a RAID here -- just something simple and
effective for a desktop system (not a server) with one or two IDE hard drives.
> > On Sat, 4 Aug 2001 12:46, Randy Kramer wrote:
> > > Why would you put the /usr and /home each on a different partition
> > > and not = with the same /(root) partition?
> > > And by the way, I am getting a 20GD HD...=20
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan.
"There are two major products that come from Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
-- Jeremy S. Anderson
