planning the new install

devil_kc · 2009-01-17 18:24:13

i got a new hdd, faster then old one so i'm planning to do a fresh install of arch system. now i have 2 sata drives and one pata drive. os will be installed on sata drive. 250GB. how to partition the drive? now i have / - 20GB (ext3) and /home - rest od 160GB drive- 135 GB or so also in ext3. + 1GB swap( i have 1gb of ram)
how would you partition this 250 GB drive? make separate /boot? /var? or? which fs to use? should i try ext4? maybe go with reiserfs? i'm planning to buy ups so there will not be any drops in power + i have a good PSU.
hope someone will help.
sorry for my eng(r)lish

112percent · 2009-01-17 20:31:05

I personally don't think the FS matters to much unless you're doing something very specific like Movie Editing. I'm a fan of JFS for my system.

As for your proposed partitioning the only thing I would suggest is having a separate /boot partition.

mooreted · 2009-01-17 20:42:31

I don't install much software so I usually set the root partition to 10gb. Small swap and boot partitions and let /home have the rest.

Dieter@be · 2009-01-18 16:46:19

personally I use 100MB for /boot, then a 2nd partition which I encrypt with dm_crypt, then on top of that an LVM setup with 2GB for /, 2GB for /home. You can increase those volumes later...

Tiberius · 2009-01-24 12:48:23

I normally do something like this

/boot 500mb ext2
/root 10gig ext3
/home 10gig ext3
create extended partition with the rest and split four ways
/my data
/spare testing partition - maybe another OS I want to try
/downloads - everything I download goes here and I build pkgs here as well
/backups - all sys backups go here

Hope it helps and when the new iso arrives i'll be going to ext4!

Xyne · 2009-01-24 13:19:53

Create 2 physical partitions, one for boot, one for LVM. I have a 100 MB boot partition on this system which only runs Arch and it uses less than 25 MB. 100 MB is a general recommendation though and it leaves room for future uses.

With LVM, you can easily create logical volumes and shuffle them around. You could try this first:

/boot    100 MB (physical partition)
/        500 MB (logical volume)
/usr      10 GB (logical volume)
/var     3-5 GB (logical volume)
/home 10-100 GB (logical volume)
/tmp .. depends
swap... depends

If you keep a large collection of media files in /home, go big, otherwise there's no point. You could also create a few other logical volumes for media and other things (e.g. encrypted logical volumes, etc). I would try to keep enough free space in the volume group to always be able to clone/copy another logical volume, e.g. if your largest logical volume ends up being volgroup-media and that's 50 GB, keep 50 GB free. This makes it easy to change file systems for different partitions, e.g. if you had media on jfs and wanted to convert to ext4, you would create a new volume group, format it with ext4, then just copy your files over and remove the old logical volume to free up the space again.

The other advantage of LVM is that you can extend it with space on your other disks, e.g. 10 GB from one disk and 10 GB from another to form a 20 GB logical partition.

The size of /tmp and /swap really depend on what you want to do. 5 GB is probably enough for /tmp but apparently some rare things require nearly 10 GB of space to do things (I think I read that some DVD burners need that when I was deciding how to partition my space). swap depends on how much RAM you have and how much you use. If you want to go crypto and have the hardware to manage it, you can create an encrypted swap that uses a random key on boot and then create /tmp as a ramdisk so that nothing in /tmp or swap is ever recoverable after you poweroff, plus /tmp is fast as f#$%.

*edit*
The advantage of having /tmp and /var on separate partitions is that you can use different file systems. I don't know how ext4 fits into the scheme, but before its arrival, the general recommendation was to use ReiserFS for /var and ext3 for almost everything else. I think ext2 was recommended for /tmp (no point in journalling what won't be there at restart).

Last edited by Xyne (2009-01-24 13:22:04)

pogeymanz · 2009-01-24 15:55:05

I really like Reiserfs and Jfs. I use reiserfs for /var and it seems pretty dang fast. Also make sure to make /var the first partition on your drive (I give it about 4GB) so it will be even faster. My scheme looks like this:

/var resierfs 4GB
swap 3GB ( I have 1GB RAM, but compile big apps sometimes and had the space to burn)
/ JFS 20GB
/home ext3 the rest of 250GB
/boot ext2 100MB

I only have two complaints. reiserfs takes longer than most filesystems to mount (by only a few seconds- not really a big deal) and when I don't shutdown properly I can't mount JFS partitions from a liveCD unless I run fsck.jfs on my root partition and a lot of liveCD's don't have that tool. (But the Arch installer/rescue disk does )

I use ext3 for home because I've heard it is the safest filesystem, but I have not lost any data yet. Otherwise I would use JFS for /home too. Maybe next time.

Ranguvar · 2009-01-24 18:56:20

For large files only, XFS (though I've heard it dies much more readily if there's bad hardware). For saving CPU cycles, JFS. For ultimate performance with very small files and on-the-fly compression, Reiser4 (note that its partitions cannot be resized, and future support level is unknown). For stability as only concern, ext3. For small, unfrequently-used partitions (/boot), ext2. For everything else, ext4 - it beats ReiserFS, JFS, and ext3 in most benchmarks, and is very competitive with Reiser4, only losing in a few cases (deleting lots of small files). Filesystem to watch for the future? btrfs.

Last edited by Ranguvar (2009-01-24 18:56:57)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-17 18:24:13

planning the new install

#2 2009-01-17 20:31:05

Re: planning the new install

#3 2009-01-17 20:42:31

Re: planning the new install

#4 2009-01-18 16:46:19

Re: planning the new install

#5 2009-01-24 12:48:23

Re: planning the new install

#6 2009-01-24 13:19:53

Re: planning the new install

#7 2009-01-24 15:55:05

Re: planning the new install

#8 2009-01-24 18:56:20

Re: planning the new install

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