Thoughts on upgrade/partitions?

[Trio3b]

MDK 10.2 on Intel D815EEA mainboard has been fine for my business work for the past two years, but have outgrown my HD.

 

Any thoughts on MDV 2007? 2008? If it aint' broke don't fix it? ( I am very comfortable with 10.2)

 

Even if I reinstall 10.2 onto a bigger HD, would like some thoughts on partitions. I will keep large audio and/or video files on the family PC so my business PC will mainly see text and PDF files, scanned docs, etc.

 

Current setup is 40 gb with XP (hda1- 10gb), FAT share(hda2- 15gb), and MDK10.2 in a /,swap,/home configuration. (hda5,6,7- 15gb)

 

Will be losing the XP install as I haven't booted into it for over a year now.

Was considering 2 HDs, one 80gb main and a second 40gb for backup of important data

 

How does this look?

 

80 gb - /,swap, /home,/var, a spare partition for tinkering with second distro

40gb - one or two (ext3) partitions , swap (?)

In the past I have just burned important stuff to CD as backup, but recently tried using MCC backup and it swelled /var quite a bit so need to put it someplace large and easily accessible.

 

1. Will MDV backup accept /var on a separate drive?

 

2. Can or should I put /var on the second drive?

 

3. Is there a way to leave /var on the main drive and have backups automatically copied to the spare?

 

4. Have heard about swaps on both drives helping speed.... I don't think I need swap on the 40gb, do I? If so, where's the best place to put them in the partitioning scheme?

 

5. Suggestions for other configs? Where , physically on the disk is the best place for these partitions?

 

6. Thoughts on filesystems? (ext3 or reiser)

 

Am I missing anything?

 

Any input appreciated.

Edited November 9, 2007 by Trio3b

[scarecrow]

1. Yes, you can put /var in a separate drive/partition, on Mandriva or any other distro. However, this has a meaning only on high volume servers, where /var holds HUGE unpurged logfiles. For a regular home computer, or workstation, this is definitely not needed.

2. If you have a reasonable box (class core Duo 1.8G with 1 GB RAM, or better) you don't need a swap file at all... but in any case you can keep a small (some 256M) swapfile, just in case. This will suffice for all tasks.

3. I tend to use Reiser 3.6 on the / (and /var) filesystems, and ext3 everywhere else (reiser sucks bigtime when managing large files, but it's much faster than any other filesystem with small files, and also fragments much less). Also, if you are behind some UPS all the time you may try XFS. It's very fast filesystem, with MUCH better behaviour than Reiser 3.6 on large files, but has a rather bad record on emergency cituations (recovering from a crash due to power outage may show half your system files in the "lost and found" folder!). And avoid Reiser 4 right now at all costs- it is simply not-there-yet.

[ianw1974]

XFS is also very bad dealing with small files. Best suited for multimedia application types where files are almost always large.

 

I use ext3 servers, reiserfs for desktops. reiserfs is a good compromise for small and large files. And I'm not talking about reiserfs4, if it's not stable, I won't use it.

 

However, btrfs as a filesystem is looking interesting at least when it becomes finalised and stable.

[Dyslexic]

And avoid Reiser 4 right now at all costs- it is simply not-there-yet.

 

Apart from consuming a few cycles more than typical, and the lead developer refusing to adopt Linux kernel coding conventions then killing his wife and going to jail, what's wrong with Reiser4? Hans Reiser may be unstable, but I haven't heard anything pointing to instabilities in Reiser4. I would say it's fine for home/standalone desktop use, and a very good general purpose FS.

Edited November 10, 2007 by Dyslexic

[darkscot]

80 gb - /,swap, /home,/var, a spare partition for tinkering with second distro

40gb - one or two (ext3) partitions , swap (?)

In the past I have just burned important stuff to CD as backup, but recently tried using MCC backup and it swelled /var quite a bit so need to put it someplace large and easily accessible.

Why are you limiting yourself to an 80GB hard drive? I don't know where you are but in the UK you can get a 80GB Maxtor for about £26 and a 250GB for £35. I use a Maxtor 200GB as my main drive (XP & Linux) and a 320GB Hitachi as my second drive for data and backup. When I want to do a backup I simply copy over /home to a backup folder on my 2nd drive.

 

You may think you only 'need' 80Gb but having all that extra space makes life a lot easier.

[Trio3b]

Why are you limiting yourself to an 80GB hard drive?

It's just handy and I will only be loading text and some scanned .tiff or .jpeg on this drive, but if I run a cross a good deal I will pickup a 160 or 250bg HD.

 

Thanks

[Mitchell]

This will probably serve to confuse you, and if you are happy with your previous backup and installations then stay with that, but personally I would upgrade to 2008, or 2007.1 for the supported updates from Mandriva... I have never used your MDK 10.2, so can't comment on that. There are often issues with User switching and such using Compiz and Compiz-Fusion (new 3d desktop managers in last 2 distros), however these can be disabled in the Mandriva Control Centre. I have found very few problems with 2008.0 doing that.

 

Re backups, if you've just started playing around with them, I don't recommend what Mandriva has natively installed. I've never been able to get it working properly, though it's very liklely this is user error on my part. An easier solution for me has been a package called 'Mondo' (in software repositories with both 2007.1 and 2008.0. Unsure about MDK 10.2). Backs up your computer to a wide variety of media, and can restore from bare metal. There are lots of other neat features, such as being able to reorganize your partitions on a system restore (which I've never used to date), and restoring only chosen files. Since installing Mandriva 2007.1 (and Linux), I've 'crashed' my system several times. Mondo has been great for getting things back working again. Anyway, I'll stop rambling, good luck.