You are not logged in.

#1 2010-07-06 10:28:51

npinn001
Member
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 5

New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

I have been a user of Linux for 18 months flipping from 6 month release distro to distro and have worked my way through about 20 plus distros to get to Arch. I use sidux at the moment but want to move away, and my main reasons for moving to Arch are rolling release, ie setting up the system once and maintaining, packages, KDE4, lightweight etc. It was why i moved to sidux but theres alot of infighting there.

Anyway, because i used to reinstall all the time i only used to use the following partitions:

250gb hard drive

/boot 200MB
/root 20GB
SWAP 3GB
/home 57GB
/common - remaining space (keep all my music etc on here)

Now, i read up about /usr and /var, and i wondered if someone could tell me if there is a better way to partition my drive for optimal system usage. I mainly web surf, email, download distros and music etc, watch films etc etc.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards

Offline

#2 2010-07-06 10:47:20

jamba
Member
From: NC
Registered: 2010-02-14
Posts: 15
Website

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

I used to partition everything out, kind of like what you listed and /usr and /var.  (I think it is still set up like that on this comp)

These days I just partition swap ,  /home and then /(root), and maybe something like /common (although I think everything like that is under my /home).  maybe a /boot.  simple is better, I figure.   easier for me to back up, and restore in the event something goes wrong.

Offline

#3 2010-07-06 12:46:48

ancient_archer
Member
From: Slovakia
Registered: 2010-03-13
Posts: 107

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Well npinn001,

I honestly think that your partition scheme is really very good and there is nothing to improve much. But perhaps you should consider whether you really need 57 GB for home and 3 GB for swap. I don't know what's your PC configuration but I think that 1.5 GB for swap should be really well enough. And if you store your documents and everything in /common, I would also say that 20 GB is enough for /home, too (unless you play some games in Wine which need a lot of space...)

And as for separate /usr, /var I wouldn't use them as separate partitions since it may cause problems! And if you don't need an old kernel which doesn't work with ext4, I would equally format all partitions as ext4 except for /boot (ext2) and perhaps /common (XFS) if you store bigger files here - ISOs, videos, mp3s etc. although performance benefit for XFS in comparison with ext4 is rather slight.

Offline

#4 2010-07-06 14:58:21

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

1) You don't need a separate /boot partition unless you plan to use the same /boot for multiple Linux distros. I mean you can have a separate partition but it wouldn't be any different than having it right under / (root). When I was distro hopping, I used to keep a /boot, but now I simply put it under / (root)

2) Having a separate /var helps you in installing a different file system. This IMHO, is highly useful, because you can then install reiserfs on it which is greatly suited to numerous small sized files. /var in Arch holds exactly these types of files. So I always create a separate /var with reiserfs on it.

3) 20 GB is way too much for root. and a waste of space IMO. I have a 5 GB root and I have used only 58% of it. Given, that I use a minimal system with only the necessary software installed. If you plan to install multiple DEs and varied apps, you will need additional space. So you might want to think about how you are going to use your system and how much are you going to install on it.

4) 3GB worth of swap is again way too much unless you plan to use suspend/hibernate. I never use that, so the max size of my swap is never greater than 512 MB. If you do want to suspend/hibernate, your swap size should be atleast = size of your RAM. But best practice is to give 125% of your RAM size, just to make up for bad sectors.

5) Again if you don't install too much stuff, your /home would not get very large and so you can use that space in your /common ( I am assuming that you have another OS - likely Windows that you want to share files among). Best thing would be to put ntfs on that partition. That way you wouldn't have to install a bunch of ext2 readers on Windows. I use a 5GB home and my /common is the biggest partition.


Tip: Keep your /home and /common adjacent to each other when you create the partition. That way, if you do find later on that you gave way to much space to /home, then you can easily shrink it and merge it with /common or the other way around.

Tip 2: Always try to gauge what files you are going to put on a particular partition and then choose a filesystem for it. Bigger files- try to incline yourself towards JFS or XFS, smaller/numerous files - reiserfs, a balance between both - ext3/ext4

Good Luck.

Last edited by Inxsible (2010-07-06 15:00:42)


Forum Rules

There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

Offline

#5 2010-07-06 16:21:41

nixpunk
Member
Registered: 2009-11-23
Posts: 271

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Inxsible wrote:

2) Having a separate /var helps you in installing a different file system. This IMHO, is highly useful, because you can then install reiserfs on it which is greatly suited to numerous small sized files. /var in Arch holds exactly these types of files. So I always create a separate /var with reiserfs on it.

I just recently started doing this with Arch installs and it no doubt speeds up Pacman, amongst other things.  I highly recommend it as well.

Offline

#6 2010-07-06 20:49:51

npinn001
Member
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 5

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Many many thanks for all your help folks. I know the question has probably been done to death but this really did help.

Im thinking the best setup would therefore be:

SWAP          512MB
/root             10GB   EXT4
/VAR            10GB   Reiserfs
/home          30GB EXT4 (Virtualbox disks will be here)
/common    Rest EXT4

I will only be using arch, i just call it common as its my common directory for files.

Is that order correct in terms of start of disk to end?

Cheers

Offline

#7 2010-07-06 21:06:43

npinn001
Member
Registered: 2010-07-06
Posts: 5

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Or maybe even as the arch new user wiki suggests:

/root 15GB EXT4
/Var  10GB Reiserfs
SWAP 1GB
/home 30GB EXT4
/common Rest EXT4

Any opinions/suggestions greatly appreciated.

Offline

#8 2010-07-06 21:47:15

ancient_archer
Member
From: Slovakia
Registered: 2010-03-13
Posts: 107

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

The second option seems to me a bit better.

Offline

#9 2010-07-08 17:51:55

FxF
Member
Registered: 2010-07-08
Posts: 8

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

npinn001,

As you have found, there are more opinions about partitioning and filesystems than there are ways to setup your harddisk.  (almost) smile  I've been doing a lot of research on this lately, both here and on other fora, and the only simple conclusions I've found are 1) It depends; 2) Filesystem/partitioning geeks are as passionate as distro geeks; and 3) See # 1.

I think the reason it's so hard to give (and get) good advice on partitioning & and filesystems is that it really, REALLY depends on what your system is like and what you're using it for... in other words, you have to think about it, not just read a guide or copy some other Archer's partitioning/filesystem scheme.  It's helpful to see what other Archers are doing, but it's even more important to understand WHY s/he's doing it that way.

Take the issue of swap.  Some people will give you the 'rule of thumb' of 2x your RAM.  But if you have 8 GB of RAM, you'll probably rarely use a byte of that swap, much less 16 GB, UNLESS you are running certain RAM-hungry applications.  Some will tell you you don't need swap if you have 3 GB or more... but if you want to hibernate your system, you'd want the swap (though I believe tuxonice is an alternative) or there are those memory-intensive apps again.  And there was that one guy who put in a swap of more than twice his 4GB+ RAM because he said he was running apps that used that space efficiently.  Go figure.

NTFS vs. ext3 for a 'common data' partition shared by Windoze & Linux?  I'd been using NTFS, but noticed that the drivers seem to suck up a lot of processing power (CPU load), and I have the ext drivers on my Windows systems already, so I'm going to switch.  I even found a ReiserFS driver for Windows (read-only, experimental) and may give that a try.  If Windoze slows to a crawl, so be it... lol

The system I'm configuring now is decidedly un-Arch-like (in terms of KISS) and weird -- it'll be a laptop with Win7/Arch/Gentoo/Lubuntu/space for ChromeOS/xPUD installed on a 320 GB HDD (and maybe an 80 GB SSD in the ExpressPCI slot if I can scrape up the $$$ for it), to be used as a desktop/web-surfing/entertainment system -- so my (work-in-progress) scheme probably won't help you much, but hopefully the reasoning behind my decisions will:

~50 GB   NTFS  Win7  (apologies to the Tux purists)
~10 GB   NTFS  Win7 restore
    6 GB   swap   /swap  (upgrading to 4GB RAM, space to hibernate)
100 MB   ext2     /boot    (multi-boot, may need more space to put Gentoo-compiled kernel here)
  10 GB   JFS     mount as /home when running Arch (JFS for low CPU load)
  10 GB   JFS     mount as /home when running Gentoo
  10 GB   JFS     mount as /home when running Lubuntu
    5 GB   JFS     mount as /home when running ChromeOS
  10 GB   JFS     mount as / (root) when running Arch (JFS for low CPU load, may use ext3 if necessary)
  10 GB   JFS     mount as /  when running Gentoo
  15 GB   JFS     mount as /  when running Lubuntu
    5 GB   JFS     mount as /  when running ChromeOS
  10 GB   Reiser  mount as /var when running Arch
  10 GB   Reiser  mount as /var when running Gentoo
  10 GB   Reiser  mount as /usr/portage when running Gentoo


The remaining HDD space will be devoted to a common data partition, deciding on the filesystem (probably ext3 for Windoze access, but I'd prefer to use JFS for lower CPU load) and the mount point (/common or /data makes sense, but I'd like to follow the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard if possible)

/tmp will be a ~500 MB  tmpfs partition in my RAM (another reason for having a /swap partition)

xPUD will 'live' inside my primary Linux partition, either Arch or Gentoo.

When I get a PCI-Express SSD, I may try putting /bin and /sbin ('static' command and system binaries) there to see if I get better performance and/or battery lifetime.

As I mentioned above, this is still a work in progress, and will undoubtedly be tweaked as I learn more.  But you get the idea.... smile

Last edited by FxF (2010-07-08 17:52:34)

Offline

#10 2010-08-16 23:34:52

Taoist
Member
Registered: 2010-08-16
Posts: 13

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Hello again:)
Since the thread already exists, there seems no reason why I shouldn't ask my question. If I am overstepping bounds or anything I apologize.
I want to know which scheme is better for a single user laptop:
                                                                                              /dev/sda1: /
                                                                                              /dev/sda2 :swap
                                                                                              /dev/sda3: home
                                                                                              /dev/sda4: var

                                                                                                   OR

                                                                                              /dev/sda1: /
                                                                                              /dev/sda2: swap
                                                                                              /dev/sda3: var
                                                                                              /dev/sda4: home

Thanks!

Offline

#11 2010-08-17 00:13:32

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: New to Arch, looking to change partion setup

Taoist wrote:

Hello again:)
Since the thread already exists, there seems no reason why I shouldn't ask my question. If I am overstepping bounds or anything I apologize.
I want to know which scheme is better for a single user laptop:
                                                                                              /dev/sda1: /
                                                                                              /dev/sda2 :swap
                                                                                              /dev/sda3: home
                                                                                              /dev/sda4: var

                                                                                                   OR

                                                                                              /dev/sda1: /
                                                                                              /dev/sda2: swap
                                                                                              /dev/sda3: var
                                                                                              /dev/sda4: home

Thanks!

As you've opened another thread https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=102995 and got replies there, you can blank this post.

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB