Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

lolilolicon · 2009-05-30 01:18:30

Hi, I've got a 1TB USB external hard drive, which seems a little big for me. I'm going to partition this big guy but wondering what's to be considered. That's why I'm here to ask.

I've got quite a big collection of music files, mainly in mp3 format, some ogg and ape\flac as well. That is, about 100GB of them. I'm gonna leave a 300GB partition for these files and their potential brothers and sisters. So, what's the best filesystem for this? NTFS?:P

For the rest of it, maybe 120GB for some video files and stuff. The rest may be going to serve as backups and maybe, I'm wondering if it is possible to install Arch on it, thus wherever I go, I go with Arch.

So I don't know what I'm precisely going to do with it... Any suggestions are appreciated

Edit::

don't use partitions to seperate data (movies/music/software/documents/etc), use folders instead.

That is what I found as I googled around a bit. Why? Doesn't it slow things down to have a huge partition? Plus, I think it's easier to get screwed if you have a huge partition and one little thing goes wrong within it, isn't it?

Last edited by lolilolicon (2009-05-30 03:41:44)

kjon · 2009-05-30 02:35:17

I would recommend you fat32, as inline replacement of ntfs

lolilolicon · 2009-05-30 03:27:56

So you guys do believe NTFS to be the best option? (except FAT32, of course.) At least it played well with windows, considering compatibility with the universal environment......

droog · 2009-05-30 03:55:05

I always used folders instead of partitions on externals too, partitions always got in the way when one was close
to full and had to do alot of needless rearranging to make room in the video folder cause that partition was almost
full, then have videos split across 2 partitions etc..

lolilolicon · 2009-05-30 04:08:30

That's right. But what's the downside of using folders but not partitions?

heleos · 2009-05-30 04:28:58

lolilolicon wrote:

That's right. But what's the downside of using folders but not partitions?

On an external? Nothing really. I was taught to use partitions on your main drive because when windows got a virus, you could re-install without losing all your files I would just use folders also.

lolilolicon · 2009-05-30 04:54:02

So I think I would go with one huge NTFS disk then.

fukawi2 · 2009-05-30 06:31:55

lolilolicon wrote:

Plus, I think it's easier to get screwed if you have a huge partition and one little thing goes wrong within it, isn't it?

Yep. If something goes drastically wrong with your partition (or even as simple as not unmounting it correctly) then you could loose everything in the partition. At least if you have separate partitions for everything then you limit the damage.

Of course, then you're making presumptions about your future usage, which could be drastically wrong. This is where LVM is a god send, but not if you want to be cross-platform.

And also, a good backup strategy also negates the risk if you put everything in one big partition.

lolilolicon · 2009-05-30 10:01:52

@fukawi2

So what's the difference? What exactly does LVM provide? In the wiki I read::

Think of physical volumes as big building blocks which can be used to build your hard drive.

which is interesting.
I'm not sure though... Is it that LVM will prevent some "domino effects" that one little piece falls then everything dies and you get doomed? Like those "big building blocks" you get with LVM are independent from each other and won't bring others down when any of them gets sick? I'm just guessing around...don't really get the point. But I'm really interested it seems to be nice. Would you explain it to me?

fukawi2 · 2009-05-30 12:30:26

No, LVM won't prevent problems from your hard drive failing... You 'format' your drive/partition(s) as a Physical Volume, then you use those Physical Volumes (PVs) to create Volume Groups (VGs) You can take multiple PV's and combine them into a single VG which is the size of all the partitions/drives combined.

You then divide ("partition") your VG into Logical Volumes (VGs) which is what you actually format with a file system and then mount. The biggest advantage is for example in your case you could make one big PV, then create VG with it, and then create say 3 x LV's:
100gb = Music
100gb = Videos
50gb = Photos

Then as long as you use a filesystem that supports resizing (ext3/4, ReiserFS, XFS or JFS afaik) then when your movie collection gets too big, you can extent the size of the Video LV using the space that you didn't allocate at the start and make it say 200gb. This way you can dynamically resize and reallocate your disk space to different 'partitions'. If you decide to store your photos somewhere else, you can delete that LV, and allocate that space to your Movies or Music, or leave it as 'free' space to put where you need it in 6 months time etc.

ammon · 2009-05-30 13:28:11

use ext3. Its standard... and windows can use it. There are drivers. Just google it

lolilolicon · 2009-05-31 04:11:04

@fukawi2
Thanks very much for explaining that to me! Seems LVM really helps with problems like what droog mentioned before. Disk becomes soft and flexible, you do everything on the fly... And the ability to take snapshot is also interesting, seems backup takes just really little space this way. Think I will try it sometime. ^^

@ammon
I knew windows can mount ext3, with Ext2 IFS or ext2fsd. And I actually had ext2fsd installed on my XP. But not every PC's got these drivers installed, indeed almost none of them around me does, while almost every machine running linux has got ntfs-3g. So I think it is just fine to use ntfs if I can't tell ext3 is actually much better than ntfs thus I have a real reason to stick with ext3.

klixon · 2009-05-31 12:05:31

You can always make a small NTFS-partition containing the windows drivers... You've got plenty of room.
Plus you get the added bonus of spreading those drivers around

Last edited by klixon (2009-05-31 12:05:48)

sveri80 · 2009-05-31 12:17:44

You even can install a live linux on a small partition that can mount ntfs drives and boot from that one to copy "of course only legal data" to your friends.

jowilkin · 2009-05-31 12:26:00

ammon wrote:

use ext3. Its standard... and windows can use it. There are drivers. Just google it

It depends on the use case. If you are ever going to plug it into a computer you don't own thats running windows then the chances are very slim that there is an ext3 driver installed.

I would go with FAT32 in one large partition. NTFS is ok, but if for instance you have an unclean unmount/shutdown, Linux doesn't know how to fix it. You need to start up Windows to properly check the disk.

lolilolicon · 2009-05-31 13:04:20

Seems some guys would do anything to go with linux any where any time... If only my friend wouldn't kick me out if every time I want to plug it in they'd have to install some driver they'd never use or even reboot and give their whole system into the hands of my hard drive. Maybe not so good an idea I guess. But I will maybe sometime give that a try to see how much people would get pissed off by my weird confusing behavior...

@jowilkin
So you mean linux can't handle NTFS cleanly if some bad unmounting/shutdown happens, while FAT32 is free of risk of this kind?
NTFS seems to have better features than FAT32. I didn't know FAT32 supports up to 8TiB until yesterday but it's still true that it does not support file sizing over 4GiB. While with NTFS, it's 16 EiB, which means limitless in my case. I have sometimes some video files much larger than 4GB so I can't live well with just FAT32. How risky is NTFS seriously?

tkdfighter · 2009-05-31 14:39:35

No, no and no again. Do not use FAT!! I'm not a big fan of NTFS (or any other filesystem in particular, disregarding ZFS , but using a old, outdated, non-journaling FS which is limited to a filesize of 4GiB is not a solution IMO. In your case using NTFS makes perfect sense.
Concerning the partitioning, I would go for one large partition. Don't make you life more complicated than it has to be LVM adds another layer of code, and code always(!) contains bugs. AFAIK, there is no Windows support for LVM. Modern filesystems are designed to avoid fragmentation, if your worried about that. But you won't get a lot of that anyways if you don't fill up your HD to the limit and then move stuff around alot.
There you go, simple solution that just works!

lolilolicon · 2009-05-31 15:29:21

I'm doing it.
cfdisk, set sdb3 as NTFS which is 500GB in size, then

$ sudo mkntfs -L "NTFS" /dev/sdb3

This, takes about centuries! Took about 3 hours now and it's 20%(Initializing device with zeroes: 20%).... What a bitch, err!

Last edited by lolilolicon (2009-05-31 15:32:11)

tehabe · 2009-05-31 19:39:25

lolilolicon wrote:

$ sudo mkntfs -L "NTFS" /dev/sdb3

You should use:

$ sudo mkntfs -Q -L "NTFS" /dev/sdb3

manpage of mkntfs wrote:

-Q: Perform quick (fast) format. This will skip both zeroing of the volume and bad sector checking.

lolilolicon · 2009-06-01 02:00:29

Yes, thanks, I did saw the option!
What, who would ever have thought this takes more than half a daly?!
I just didn't see some zeroing and checking would consume such a long time and get my HD on fire! I mean, it's kinda stupid...Everybody should get warned if they are gonna do some mkntfs and not in a mood of killing a bunch of time by potentially killing their hard drive.
Excuse me, but fuck,fuck,and fuck again.

Arch Linux

#1 2009-05-30 01:18:30

Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#2 2009-05-30 02:35:17

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#3 2009-05-30 03:27:56

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#4 2009-05-30 03:55:05

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#5 2009-05-30 04:08:30

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#6 2009-05-30 04:28:58

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#7 2009-05-30 04:54:02

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#8 2009-05-30 06:31:55

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#9 2009-05-30 10:01:52

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#10 2009-05-30 12:30:26

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#11 2009-05-30 13:28:11

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#12 2009-05-31 04:11:04

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#13 2009-05-31 12:05:31

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#14 2009-05-31 12:17:44

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#15 2009-05-31 12:26:00

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#16 2009-05-31 13:04:20

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#17 2009-05-31 14:39:35

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#18 2009-05-31 15:29:21

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#19 2009-05-31 19:39:25

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

#20 2009-06-01 02:00:29

Re: Suggested partition for a 1TB hard drive?

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