Arch Linux

moljac024

Member

From: Serbia

Registered: 2008-01-29

Posts: 2,676

Re: Whats the benefits of having multiple partitions?

What do you people think of this layout :

/boot    - 512 MB
/          - 12 GB
/var     - 4.5 GB
/tmp    - 2.5 GB
/home  - 5 GB

/data  - 120 GB

Last edited by moljac024 (2008-02-12 11:58:21)

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The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck, is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.
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But if they tell you that I've lost my mind, maybe it's not gone just a little hard to find...

abstracity

Member

From: Houston, USA

Registered: 2007-08-08

Posts: 83

Re: Whats the benefits of having multiple partitions?

What do you people think of this layout :

/boot    - 512 MB
/          - 12 GB
/var     - 4.5 GB
/tmp    - 2.5 GB
/home  - 5 GB

/data  - 120 GB

I don't know if you need that much space for /boot.  A 150MB /boot partition should be more than adequate.  And also, if you are going to be storing all your user data in /data, you may not need to devote in an entire 5GB of space to the file system; often a modest 100MB /home partition is suitable in this situation.

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Without error there can be no brilliancy. ― Emanuel Lasker

grndrush

Member

From: Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Registered: 2003-12-28

Posts: 136

Website

Re: Whats the benefits of having multiple partitions?

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet; an idea that came into my head, I tried, and I like it.

I use LVM for almost everything, including swap. All the partitions within LVM use ReiserFS. I have a small, separate /boot partition, as well.

The 'trick' I use I haven't seen mentioned, is this: I create a separate partition, after LVM: /var/cache/pacman. I use *ext2* (saves you from having the ext3 modules loaded), and when I create that partition, I use -N 4096. I give the partition 4GB; modify to suit or needs/tastes.

You're highly unlikely to ever need more the 4K inodes in that partition (and if you think you might, 8K or 16K would work as well). By keeping the number of inodes small, there's no extended wait at boot time for fsck, and putting the (relatively rarely accessed) pacman cache behind LVM means a more tightly-packed live system, and considerably less head movement.