Partition guide....

Mr Green · 2008-07-14 14:32:45

I know its been asked before but, just stuck a 500gb sata drive in my box and I am thinking of transferring Arch on it

looking at

100mb /boot [maybe a little on the large side!]
20gb / [root is that enough!]
swap [twice ram!]
rest /home

unless I can drop swap and create /media

or

run the three drives I have 2x250gb 1x500gb in Raid 5 ?

MrG

tigrmesh · 2008-07-14 15:36:36

I think 100mb for /boot is reasonable. That way, if you ever decide to create custom kernels and/or run rc kernels from kernel.org, you don't have to worry about running out of room.

20gb for / sounds good to me. I have / on an 8gb partition, and it's using 5.7gb now. I'm about to resize it to 15gb; that's the largest it can be without my losing one of my testing partitions. You might want to make / bigger if you're planning to keep your /var/cache/pacman/pkg/ uncleared for a long time.

Procyon · 2008-07-14 15:48:59

Swap twice ram is outdated. 512 MB should be enough for anyone.

Zeist · 2008-07-14 16:30:38

Mr Green wrote:

run the three drives I have 2x250gb 1x500gb in Raid 5 ?

RAID5 is more suited for drives that are about the same size as the raided partitions have to be the same size.

Mr Green · 2008-07-14 16:53:19

@Zeist I had a quick look in wiki and yes three similar drives are better

I can afford to run a 50gb /root plenty of room , swap yes keep around 1gb

thats cool thanks for all your help :-)

MrG

bangkok_manouel · 2008-07-14 16:54:35

pacman will love a reiserFS /var

synorgy · 2008-07-14 16:59:34

bangkok_manouel wrote:

pacman will love a reiserFS /var

+1

Mr Green · 2008-07-14 17:10:14

/boot ext2 rest ext3 reiser mmmm

dolby · 2008-07-14 17:14:11

Procyon wrote:

Swap twice ram is outdated. 512 MB should be enough for anyone.

Even for laptops?

bangkok_manouel · 2008-07-14 17:19:33

Mr Green wrote:

reiser mmmm

for /var only. do it do it do it :reversed song of the devil:

moljac024 · 2008-07-14 17:22:19

dolby wrote:

Procyon wrote:
Swap twice ram is outdated. 512 MB should be enough for anyone.
Even for laptops?

Swap twice ram is outdated, but if you plan on using hibernate aka suspend2disk you'll need swap => ram.

Oh and Mr. Green 10Gb is enough for root. Trust me, that's what I have and I can't fill it up (of course, separate /tmp and /var partitions imply).

Last edited by moljac024 (2008-07-14 17:22:36)

schivmeister · 2008-07-14 17:27:32

Whatever you end up with, keep in mind that if you have more than one partition that you'd frequently need to share/move/copy files to and fro its best you merge them - if not you will feel pain.

GogglesGuy · 2008-07-14 18:41:44

I usually have two root partitions (both same size, 10gb), just in case you ever want to do a total reinstall, you can keep the old system around while installing a new system, untill the new system is working.

iBertus · 2008-07-14 18:53:57

I have three partitions on one drive and four on another. My 1TB drive has four, the last one being Vista Ulitimate (I have to run some stuff that Wine doesn't yet handle), first on each is /, second on each is swap, and third on each is LVM. The set of /'s is running in raid1, and all other linux partitions are running in RAID10 (mdadm 1E, really) which is quiet fast and gives me the desired capacity for each drive. Currently, / is about 1.5GB (doubles as /boot, too), swap is 8GB (for s2disk), and the LVM raid is ~1.0TB. I then divide this setup into volumes with most of it going into /home (>900G), some for /usr (30G), some for /opt (15G), and some for /var (12G). Don't ask why I separate all these partitions out, I do mount them with different options, but most of it is habbit.

I have noticed that my hdparm -tT is faster without LVM (4800 MB/s and 245 MB/s for each test without LVM; 4300MB/s and 215 MB/s with LVM), but I guess the manageability is worth it.

---

Hey, Mr. Green, nice title! I've gotta get me one of those one day! LOL, I though you moved to Ubuntu? Well, once you experience the power of krypto-archie-crhronic you never go to ubuntu-weed.

Last edited by iBertus (2008-07-14 18:57:23)

thayer · 2008-07-14 19:08:36

schivmeister wrote:

Whatever you end up with, keep in mind that if you have more than one partition that you'd frequently need to share/move/copy files to and fro its best you merge them - if not you will feel pain.

Agreed. These days I just keep a swap partition for suspend2disk and everything else goes to / (80GB @ ext3)

I use rsync and an external 200GB HD for backups & restores.

Mr Green · 2008-07-14 20:26:45

@iBertus Yes I had Ubuntu running for a while but it was painful so........

What about a 500gb /home ?

/boot could go on a CF card?

Mr Green · 2008-07-15 04:50:53

thing is what size to have for /var? some of you guys have 6gb of pac cache so what is an ideal size? then I may run reiser

attila · 2008-07-15 05:16:20

@Mr Green The pacman cache can be where you want because you can use your own CacheDir in /etc/pacman.conf.

At example i put my CacheDir to /home/CacheDirPacman and after this my /var has only 126 MB. If you don't run other apps which use /var than from my view you don't need a extra partition for /var.

One Note: Okay, a big pacman cache can save you time if something goes wrong but i would prefer backup methods as at example rsnapshot. If you do this with the abs dir too than this gives you the same possibility to step back but with less place on the harddisk. But this be only my 2c.

iBertus · 2008-07-15 05:28:38

I suppose /boot could go on a CF card in one of those adapters. I'd ask lilsiricho (spelling?) about that.

schivmeister · 2008-07-15 06:41:45

/boot isn't used a lot (grub sources the files, pacman places the files)..so I don't think it's that significant to start thinking about a separate device to mount it on.

You could always use LVM for those partitions you have no idea of how/when they'd grow. Else, don't make separate partitions for them, or leave lots of headroom eg. 10GB for your /var.

Last edited by schivmeister (2008-07-15 06:45:49)

bangkok_manouel · 2008-07-15 14:11:22

Mr Green wrote:

thing is what size to have for /var? some of you guys have 6gb of pac cache so what is an ideal size? then I may run reiser

my reiserFS /var is 4.5GO and I didn't have to Scc it since I got this lappy (october last year)

DO IT DO IT DO IT

KimTjik · 2008-07-15 14:40:27

Question: as a fan of JFS what would be the benefit of choosing ReiserFS for /var? Or would they potentially be equally fast?

I know there's been some complaints about JFS here, but I use it on several, own and others', systems and like it a lot. On old or low-spec laptops JFS makes it fly... sort of.

bangkok_manouel · 2008-07-15 14:58:43

KimTjik wrote:

Question: as a fan of JFS what would be the benefit of choosing ReiserFS for /var? Or would they potentially be equally fast?
I know there's been some complaints about JFS here, but I use it on several, own and others', systems and like it a lot. On old or low-spec laptops JFS makes it fly... sort of.

well, i'm too lazy to link to any benchmark (just google) but reiserFS is known to be fast (the fastest?) with small files. and pacman does eat loads of small files.

DonVla · 2008-07-15 15:06:08

Procyon wrote:

Swap twice ram is outdated. 512 MB should be enough for anyone.

not really. if you suspend to disk/swap you need at least so much swap space as you have ram.

iBertus · 2008-07-15 15:32:34

KimTjik wrote:

Question: as a fan of JFS what would be the benefit of choosing ReiserFS for /var? Or would they potentially be equally fast?
I know there's been some complaints about JFS here, but I use it on several, own and others', systems and like it a lot. On old or low-spec laptops JFS makes it fly... sort of.

Yes, it will give a slight performance increase for pacman and is probably good for all the little log files. That said, I use JFS for all of my partitions and it works just fine. In fact, using the hdparm -t benchmark, JFS shows 215 MB/s on my RAID10 array while ext3 shows only 164MB/s. I'm really not sure why it works like this, unless JFS automatically detects the proper stripe size when formatting. I know you have to do this manually with ext3 and I've tried many combinations to see what works best. Still, JFS seems faster on this system.

Arch Linux

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