Recommended partition sizes

Cotton · 2007-06-16 09:39:50

I'm about to move from a 160 GB to a 500 GB disk and was wondering if there are any recommendations for partitioning a disk of that size.

Currently, /var is a 20 GB (ext3) and I'm always having to delete old packages to make space. /boot is 100 MB (ext2) and thats also too small. Should /var be reiserfs these days to speed up pacman?

And for /home, what difference would it make as one huge partition rather than a few (say 5) smaller ones? Would fcsk be quicker one way or the other?

Any other advice?

byte · 2007-06-16 12:47:29

My /boot is, ever was and will always be 32 MB, that's certainly not too small. For the rest, try LVM with ext3. That way you could always resize your mountpoints whenever you feel like it.

vacant · 2007-06-16 14:24:34

I don't get it I run many Arch linux systems and 10GB is easily enough so what do you have in /var ? Does logrotate ever run on your system, or have you set squid to cache a huge amount? Do you run pacman -Sc ever?

Here's by entire Arch system from cfdisk:

       hda1                                           Primary             Linux ReiserFS                  [arch]                       10487.24

That's it. I've never bothered with separate /boot , /var partitions etc and I've now given up using a separate /home partition. But I do have a huge /mnt/share partition, owned by my user but available to all, where I keep all videos, music, pix.

Other partitions on my disks contain Windows or other Linux distros I run/test. If I ever can't boot Arch I use a Puppy linux CD to reinstall grub.

Last edited by vacant (2007-06-16 14:25:10)

Ramses de Norre · 2007-06-16 14:32:39

I've got / on a 7Gig partition with everything except /home in there and am currently using 3.44Gig with a fully functional desktop system. So I can't understand what the hell you're storing in /var and /boot neither...
/var uses 742MB here and /boot 17MB with four kernels and grub installed...

Last edited by Ramses de Norre (2007-06-16 14:34:03)

Cotton · 2007-06-16 15:56:35

Apologies, my / is 20 GB (everything except /boot & /home):

/ made up currently from:
/var
/cache (3 GB)
/abs (3 GB)
/opt (6 GB)
/usr (6 GB)
/mnt (1 GB)

/home needs to be on its own partition in the even that a complete reinstall of Arch is required. Not quite sure if /boot is necessary on its own.

@byte - I've used LVM in the past but didn't really see the advantages, it worked OK but was always a pain when having to chroot to fix something (the Arch disk didn't have device-mapper on it at the time, I recall).

Ramses de Norre · 2007-06-16 19:39:35

Cotton wrote:

Apologies, my / is 20 GB (everything except /boot & /home):
/ made up currently from:
/var
/cache (3 GB)
/abs (3 GB)
/opt (6 GB)
/usr (6 GB)
/mnt (1 GB)
/home needs to be on its own partition in the even that a complete reinstall of Arch is required. Not quite sure if /boot is necessary on its own.
@byte - I've used LVM in the past but didn't really see the advantages, it worked OK but was always a pain when having to chroot to fix something (the Arch disk didn't have device-mapper on it at the time, I recall).

Abs 3Gig?!? Mine is 81MB with all repos enabled except for testing... You really need to clean up stuff after building, and clean up pacman's cache every once in a while... My /var/cache is 536MB.
20Gig should be sufficient, but if you use space like that you might need a full hard disk ;)

raymano · 2007-06-16 19:43:51

There is no good answer to this question. It's like asking "What size pants do you think I should ware?"

It really depends on what you are trying to do. One man's best partitioning scheme is another's nightmare.

Last edited by raymano (2007-06-16 19:47:29)

.:B:. · 2007-06-16 21:00:25

raymano wrote:

There is no good answer to this question. It's like asking "What size pants do you think I should ware?"
It really depends on what you are trying to do. One man's best partitioning scheme is another's nightmare.

I don't see why you couldn't give a good answer to this question. You can specify minimal specs for some partitions, and maximum specs for others.

For example: it makes no sense to make your swap twice your RAM once your RAM gets above 512 MB. With a light WM or DE, you barely hit 512 MB (and won't use any swap either).

Your root should be at least 5 GB or so (to make sure). My root is 4 GB, and not even half of it is used. I have /var separately too, recommended is 2-3 GB. /tmp should be 512 MB at least, but 1 GB is plenty.

Separate /home is a must also. Generally you shouldn't make a big root, just put your /home on a separate partition and you'll be fine (unless you're gonna install lots of big games and stuff, then you should make your root large enough of course).

Cotton · 2007-06-16 21:02:19

@raymano The original question was really about the advantages or disadvantages of creating a filesystem on such a single partition eg whether ext3 would use up more space across multiple partitions, or be quicker in general use, or be quicker to fsck at boot time - things like that.

@Ramses de Norre pacman -Sc is run weekly. The bulk of /var is in abs/local - no individual large contributors, just an awful lot of packages, the top few:

2.34 GB /var/abs/local (85.4%)
45.7 MB /var/abs/local/google-earth (1.9%)
39.1 MB /var/abs/local/nero (1.6%)
38.5 MB /var/abs/local/e17-themes (1.6 %)
35.8 MB /var/abs/local/automanic (1.5 %)
34.5 MB /var/abs/local/secondlife (1.4 %)
33.8 MB /var/abs/local/eternallands (1.4%)
28.3 MB /var/abs/local/pixel (1.2%)
28.1 MB /var/abs/local/gimp-devel (1.2%)

pkg & src directories are deleted after build, but I always keep the packages for installation on other machines and sources for rebuilds.

Mr.Elendig · 2007-06-17 16:59:05

Now that arch boots fine with / on lvm2 I recommend to use it. That way you can change the size of the partions later, without any trouble at all, depending on how your needs changes. Just make sure to have a seperate /boot outside the lvm2

Splitting up /home over several small partions, only causes you to "waste" space in my experinece. E.g. you have 3 partions all with 1GB free, but you need 2GB space for that movie you just, legaly ofcause, downloaded.

gazj · 2007-07-20 22:57:17

I tend to keep my partitioning quite simple, 1x40gb drive, 1gb swap, 39 on /

Then i tend to mount a nfs share from my server on to my workstations under /home/docs this contains a folder for each user. I then symlink there user folder in there home folder as Documents and also a symlink /home/docs/shared to shared in everyones home folder. The fstab and ls -l of my home should explain better than i can.

i would just mount a nfs share under home, but i tend to get problems with firefox starting up really slow and problems with wine as the .wine folder just cannot be accessed fast enough

/dev/sda1 / ext3 defaults 0 1
/dev/sda2 swap swap defaults 0 0

server:/data/home /home/docs nfs rw 0 0

[gary@Lister ~]$ ls -l
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 gary users 4096 2007-07-18 20:59 Desktop
lrwxrwxrwx 1 gary users   16 2007-07-14 12:26 Documents -> /home/docs/gary/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    18 2007-07-13 23:26 Shared -> /home/docs/shared/

Last edited by gazj (2007-07-20 22:58:00)

Arch Linux

#1 2007-06-16 09:39:50

Recommended partition sizes

#2 2007-06-16 12:47:29

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#3 2007-06-16 14:24:34

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#4 2007-06-16 14:32:39

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#5 2007-06-16 15:56:35

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#6 2007-06-16 19:39:35

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#7 2007-06-16 19:43:51

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#8 2007-06-16 21:00:25

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#9 2007-06-16 21:02:19

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#10 2007-06-17 16:59:05

Re: Recommended partition sizes

#11 2007-07-20 22:57:17

Re: Recommended partition sizes

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