Partitioning Ideas

[beast2k]

Hey folks, I know a lot of people ask this but is there a ideal way to partition a hard disk for ext3 and Linux by this I mean should the swap be first or the /boot and what % should be dedicated to the /etc directory and /home ? Is having 2 physical hard drives better so for example you could put /home on its own disk. Is 2 swap partitions better than 1. There must be an ideal way to do it to maximize speed and efficiency I know there are as many answers as there are computers so perhaps we could post ideas and/or partition schemes here. Thanks in advance for any better ideas than the usual.

[tyme]

as far as speed/efficiency goes, the only thing i'm aware of is that if you can putting the swap partition on a seperate drive than your main partitions (specifically /usr) can enhance performance. I must admit, however, that I've noticed no improvement since moving my swap to a seperate drive (and it's even on a different IDE channel).

 

As far as the rest of your partition setup, I always make a seperate /home so that I can reinstall without losing my files.

 

There's also this FAQ on the subject.

Edited February 15, 2005 by tymark

[arctic]

the best setup is imho (if only one hdd is used):

1. /swap (at least double ram size, preferrably double maximum ram sze allowed on your computer (if you plan uprading later))

2. /usr (~2 gb) your apps are here, thus will start faster

3. /boot (500mb) used only at bootup, so less important than /usr

4. /home (as big as you like)

5. /root (~2 gb)

[theYinYeti]

I've read, that making swap the first partition speeds things up.

Anyway, here is how I do my partitions:

http://yves.gablin.club.fr/pc/linux.php?ar...nfig/partitions

 

Yves.

[SoulSe]

I used to get all technical about this, but now I just do this:

 

Partition 1: ext3 - 100MB /boot

Partition 2: swap - 500MB (no matter how much RAM you have, 500 is always best, IMHO)

Partition 3: reiserfs - 25% of remaining space /

Partition 4: reiserfs - the remaining space /home

 

I used to have like 8 partitions, now I just do that ^

 

EDIT: The whole "your swap should be twice your ram" story died like 8 years ago. You'll never need more than 500.

[griptypethyne]

About nine months ago when I installed 9.1 (and did not know what I was doing :D ) I ended up with a swap partition.

 

A few days ago I upgraded to 10.1, doing a clean install. This included increasing the size of the Linux partition and deleting the 9.2 swap partition. During the 10.1 install I did not read anything about a swap partition. I have just checked and here is no swap partition. I like to think that this time I know a little bit more about what I am doing B)

 

Do I have a problem? Should I create a swap partition. If so how?

 

Thanks

[theYinYeti]

If you've got enough RAM, swap is not needed. It depends also on what applications you're using...

[Gowator]

as far as speed/efficiency goes, the only thing i'm aware of is that if you can putting the swap partition on a seperate drive than your main partitions (specifically /usr) can enhance performance.  I must admit, however, that I've noticed no improvement since moving my swap to a seperate drive (and it's even on a different IDE channel).

 

As far as the rest of your partition setup, I always make a seperate /home so that I can reinstall without losing my files.

 

There's also this FAQ on the subject.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I agree except I'd name /var is the best one to keep away from swap since its constantly being written to....

And after all that like tymark says what difference? It might be measurable but I can't feel any difference. I have 1GB RAM and usually don't mount swap unless ... well I can't remember the last time... you can turn it on/off with swapon if you discover a reason :D but I notice lots better spped with it off for normal stuff.

 

/boot really is optional and if your using grub is apparently a pain.. I sometimes use it so I have a distro-neutral location for kernels.... but you really gotta be into hacking distro's to benefit ...

 

My biggest difference is I make /home trivial and small... 10GB maybe but then stick some big shared areas. I do this because more and more crap is in hidden files/directories in /home and 90% of this you don't want across distro's.. (like .kde) else you can mess stuff up...

 

Instead I make a /mnt/hda5 ... etc. and then symlink this from /home/<username>/Documents (or similar) ... I then create mp3, photo's, office_files, avi, dloads, .Maildir etc under this.

These can then be shared from other computers as I export them via NFS and also when i upgrade I can overwrite /home if I like.

 

Infact home has become a trashbin, /home/user/etc is meant to be the 'new' place for config files but so much dumps em right in /home/user it gets annoying having to move stuff so now i only move stuff I choose to share/keep

[sellis]

My system is as follows:

 

/dev/hda1 - 16GB FAT32 - Windows boot partition, mounted at /mnt/win_c

/dev/hda5 - 16GB ext3 - Linux root partition, mounted at /

/dev/hda6 - 2GB swap - Swap partition

/dev/hda7 - 113GB ext3 - User home directories, mounted at /home

/dev/hdd1 - 80GB NTFS - My old windows drive, mounted at /mnt/win_c2 (read-only)

 

I originally had the 113GB home partition formatted as FAT32 and mounted as /shared (then using symlinks from /home in much the same way described by Gowator), but I didn't need to transfer much stuff to/from Windows, and the lack of permissions, etc on FAT32 finally drove me to reformat and remount it earlier this week.

 

The old drive will probably go the same way, once I've got the big files off it that I couldn't before (FAT32 only allows 4GB files, and some of my home movies are 12GB+).