Re: hard drive configuration

[Freeman <hewho7@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jun 06, 2011 at 09:23:08AM -0700, prad wrote:
> in the past we've had two partitions:
> /
> /data
> into the latter went home, www, mail and we'd softlink from the
> appropriate places. the nice thing about this setup has always been that
> when we upgraded or tried a different system there wasn't any data
> copying to do.
> 
> now we've been experimenting with xfs on which there will be openvs
> containers to run the web/mail servers. containers go into /var/lib/vz
> and we're thinking of keeping them in a separate partition
> too. additionally, we've split things up so there are partitions for
> /usr /usr/local /tmp /home and so on.
> 
> so i'm musing over whether to have a /data partition as before - it
> doesn't seem to make quite the same sense at this stage. however, when
> it comes time to change to the next debian, i keep thinking having the
> data separate may be an advantage.
> 
> do people have favorite partitioning schemes with appropriate
> justifications for them?
> 

I take it to the extreme. 

/home includes a lot of potentially obsolete or wrong configs during a move
to a new system.  And there can still be important configs and tweaks in
/etc and /usr.  And I have lot so data in srv.

So I break it up into 7 or 8 partitions. 

Extra advantages: 

1.  easily staggered backups according to priorities
 
2.  quick disk checks at boot.  Each partition is set to a disk check
interval with a unique prime number so partition checks rarely overlap.

The disadvantage is wasted space, since each partition has some expansion
room that equals lost contiguous bulk space.  (Reading up on LVM's is on my
todo list.)  

These are about to burst because I am downloading big files. sda1, 2 & 4 are
primaries. 3 is the extended.
  
  Filesystem    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /dev/sda5     3.3G  2.6G  475M  85% /
  tmpfs         505M     0  505M   0% /lib/init/rw
  udev          504M  228K  504M   1% /dev
  tmpfs         505M     0  505M   0% /dev/shm
  /dev/sda2      77M   46M   27M  64% /boot
  /dev/sda6     2.9G  2.7G  118M  96% /usr
  /dev/sda7     4.1G  3.3G  625M  85% /usr/share
  /dev/sda8     9.2G  7.8G  900M  90% /home
  /dev/sda11    2.2G  1.7G  363M  83% /var
  /dev/sda12    4.9G  2.8G  1.9G  60% /srv
  /dev/sda10    1.6G  104K  1.5G   1% /tmp
  /dev/sda4      65G   65G  253M 100% /mnt/Library
  /dev/sda1      18G   17G  400M  98% /mnt/XP

-- 
Regards,
Freeman

"Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO (or Linux) is the
answer." --Somebody