Drive Partitioning for today's larger drive sizes

[Guest d80zoom]

I have a 250GB SATA 3 internal hard drive that I would like to install Mandriva on and just want to configure it the right way and never have to worry about resizing partitions. I was thinking about splitting the drive into 2 major partitions and then using the following configuration. (sizes are approximate).

 

Partiton 1: 123gb/ext4

/8gb (swap) I have 4gb of memory, may go up to 8gb.

/15gb (root)

/50gb (usr)

/50gb (home)

 

Partiton 2: 127gb/ext4 for file storage

/127gb (files)

 

At the moment I am using Mandriva One in 32 bit but would like to start fresh with a new instalation. I also have an external 1TB USB drive for storage. This is a home computer, I am also into digital photography and use Gimp/F-Spot for editing of images. I store all of my images on my external drive.

 

I plan on installing Mandriva Linux Free 2010 DVD in 64 bit. How would you configure a larger hard drive? Wisdom and comments would be greatly appreciated!

Edited January 26, 2010 by d80zoom

[tux99]

With 4GB of RAM you don't need any swap at all, the "double the RAM" rule is no longer valid these days, that rule was made when a good Unix server had 64-128MB RAM...

 

I run all my systems that have 2GB of RAM or more without any swap and none of them has ever run out of memory.

 

root and usr separate also is not necessary, and 20GB for root and usr together are PLENTY.

 

I would do:

 

partition 1: / 20GB (root partition for the OS)

partition 2: <empty> 20GB (empty partition for testing new distro releases)

partition 3: /home rest of the disk (you can still put other files here too and you have more flexibility if you keep it all on one partition)

Edited January 26, 2010 by tux99

[scarecrow]

I keep just a small (256M) swap file in my systems, just in case. But you can do without any swap in 99% of the cases.

I have a larger swap (3.2 GB, which is slightly larger than my physical RAM) in my laptop, because I use it to suspend to disk.

Separate /root and /usr doesn't mak sense, but separate /var does in server systems (all logfiles are stored in there, and they can be huge).

Also extremely convenient is a small (not more than 100M) /boot partition, in case you want to play with various linux distros in parallel.

Edited January 26, 2010 by scarecrow

[AussieJohn]

50Gb for /usr is totally unnecessary. A /usr is automatically created and increases in size as it needs to.

 

As said by others, again you are wasting space by having 8Gb of swap, 500Mb is more than enough with that much memory but 1Gb is OK.

 

Ideally you should use about 10Gb for /home and put all the remainder of space in a partition for Pictures Music and Videos etc.

This is so that if you want to clean up /home at anytime, you do not accidently lose that Media stuff.

 

Cheers. John.

[K Bergen]

A /usr is automatically created and increases in size as it needs to.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. :unsure: If you don't create a separate /usr it is contained within / and / has a finite size.

 

One thing I will do when/if I reinstall is to make a small 2GB? partition for /opt so that I can install third party applications there and not lose them when I re-install.

 

Ken

Edited January 27, 2010 by K Bergen

[daniewicz]

One thing I will do when/if I reinstall is to make a small 2GB? partition for /opt so that I can install third party applications there and not lose them when I re-install.

 

Good idea! B)

[AussieJohn]

Certainly /root has a finite size as set up originally but /user in root can increase to what it needs within the total /root partition and is limited only to the available space in /root. Hence no wasted space in /usr. :-)

 

In 6+ years of using Mandrake/Mandriva, I have never felt the need to make a separate /usr partition.

 

Cheers Ken. John.

[K Bergen]

Certainly /root has a finite size as set up originally but /user in root can increase to what it needs within the total /root partition and is limited only to the available space in /root. Hence no wasted space in /usr. :-)

That's what I thought but I wasn't sure. :huh:

One thing I would suggest is to not refer to / as /root, /root is the system administrator's home directory and your nomenclature could confuse new users and create problems for them.

 

Ken

[tux99]

Certainly /root has a finite size as set up originally but /user in root can increase to what it needs within the total /root partition and is limited only to the available space in /root. Hence no wasted space in /usr. :-)

 

In 6+ years of using Mandrake/Mandriva, I have never felt the need to make a separate /usr partition.

 

Cheers Ken. John.

 

True, that's why I'm of the opinon that the less partitions you have, the better it is (the more flexibility you have).

 

The only separation that's advantageous is keep the OS separate from your home+data.

 

scarecrow, I don't quite get it why you say /boot is useful for playing with distros in parallel?

I do that without /boot, what you need is another OS partition like I suggested in my first post.

/boot used to be required when boot managers were incapable of handling large disks, but that's a thing of the past now (same as the need for swap, unless you want to suspend to disk on a laptop).

[theYinYeti]

Were I you, I would use LVM, and the ReiserFS(3) filesystem.

Not because ReiserFS is better (although I find it fast and never had a single failure since using it in Mandrake 7.2), but rather because, to my knowledge, ReiserFS is the only journaled filesystem you can both grow and shrink (it can even be growed online!).

 

Yves.

[scarecrow]

@ Tux 99: You have in there ALL boot kernel images, as well as the grub config. You can adjust what kernel image you need, and what not, and edit the grub config accordingly, no matter which distro you're booted at. Moreover, the procedure to have one grub for every linux distro in there, is greatly simlified.

Do you think this is useless? Methinks it's a great convienience.

[tux99]

@ Tux 99: You have in there ALL boot kernel images, as well as the grub config. You can adjust what kernel image you need, and what not, and edit the grub config accordingly, no matter which distro you're booted at. Moreover, the procedure to have one grub for every linux distro in there, is greatly simlified.

Do you think this is useless? Methinks it's a great convienience.

 

I guess that can be convenient, but mounting the partition of some other distro release to edit the grub config isn't a lot of hassle either given that it's needed only very rarely.

I'd be concerned though, that some newly installed distro overwrites files in /boot required by one of the other installed distros.

[scarecrow]

Uhhhh... I don't claim that I've used any Linux flavour out there, but NO serious distro overwrites files in /boot without user consent. At least, none of the distros I've used (and they are quite a few) does that.

Moreover, if you have set up your Linux using RAID, and at some time you want to remove RAID, it's a nightmare most of the times. With a separate /boot partition, the procedue is way, way simpler.

Edited January 27, 2010 by scarecrow