Arch Linux

iBertus

Member

From: Greenville, NC

Registered: 2004-11-04

Posts: 2,228

Drive partitioning for new workstation

I'm getting ready to install Arch64 on my new workstation (specs in sig) and now I'm trying to figure out the best way to partition drives. I've managed two 750GB seagate SATA drives for this machine. Vista is (can't help but need it for a few things still) installed on a 250GB slice of the first drive. That leaves 500GB of space on that drive and 750GB free on the second drive. I'm sure that my /home will go on part of that second drive. I've never had this much space before and I can't seem to decied on the optimal partition layout.

skymt

Member

Registered: 2006-11-27

Posts: 443

Re: Drive partitioning for new workstation

/home will probably be your biggest volume, so I suggest filling your second drive with it. From there, it all depends on what you want to do with the system. /usr holds the largest parts of most programs, so for your setup I'd make that 100-200 GB. If you're planning on serving with it, /var should be huge. (~150 GB or more) Otherwise, it'll mostly hold log and cache files. I like to make /etc a separate volume, but it's mostly small text files, so don't give it too much.

You should consider making a RAID array, so /home can span part of both drives. There isn't 500 GB of content outside of /home on most home systems.

zyghom

Member

From: Poland/currently Africa

Registered: 2006-05-11

Posts: 432

Website

Re: Drive partitioning for new workstation

/home split on raid on both hdd, the rest does not matter IMHO

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Zygfryd Homonto

mips1

Member

Registered: 2008-01-02

Posts: 99

Re: Drive partitioning for new workstation

I've never had this much space before and I can't seem to decied on the optimal partition layout.

You might want to look into LVM. I have two 160GB drives that I'm 'going' to use lvm on which allows me to resize things easily. I will not be using raid though as I will backup my /home to an external drive.

vogt

Member

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2006-11-25

Posts: 389

Re: Drive partitioning for new workstation

I like to make /etc a separate volume, but it's mostly small text files, so don't give it too much.

You need to watch out when you do this: you need enough things in the /etc/ on your root (not the separate partition) in order to be able to actually start up, and mount the big /etc where it belongs. This pretty well describes it.

I would recommend lvm (flexibility) on top of raid 1 (reliability), basically following the Arch wiki.

The point of software raid 1 would be to allow your computer to still run in the case of a disk crash, at the cost of loosing half your space (not an issue?).

Of course, the setup for raid involves a couple steps; creating, then assembling arrays. creating physical volume, volume groups, creating logical volumes, informing /etc/mdadm.conf of your raid, then adding a couple parameters to your kernel on boot. + a couple of initcpio hooks.

Maybe that's too complicated, or more work than the pain of reinstalling or restoring backups in the case of a crash.

And anyways, raid is never a substitute for backups! Think about what happens with rm -rf /, or when a disk corrupts data.

EDIT: Raid 0 is not recommended as there is no redundancy. Swap on raid 1 if you don't want to have a crash when a disk goes. Otherwise just have a couple of swap partitions with equal priority.

EDIT2: If anything raid 1 improves performance slightly, by allowing reads to occur in parallel (sometimes).

Last edited by vogt (2008-01-12 22:23:27)