[H-GEN] partition advice

Robert Brockway robert at blake.humbug.org.au
Sun Feb 21 21:56:31 EST 1999


On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, Paul Gearon wrote:

> Now I've normally been pretty lazy when it came to partitioning my drives,
> but this time I've decided to try to squeeze as much out of it as I could.
> I recall some time back (over a year???) someone asked a similar question
> about size/position of partitions, but I can't find the thread.  From
> memory, someone (Robert?) suggested having the swap partition first for
> reasons of speed, but I really don't recall all that much about it.

There is a whole theory of how to partition a disk :)

Here is what I have (spread across 2 disks) on blake:

blake[12:37pm]:~>df
Filesystem         1024-blocks  Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/dev/hda1              15856   11910     3116     79%   /
/dev/hda3            1189542  572591   555489     51%   /usr
/dev/hda4             726443  453013   235908     66%   /opt
/dev/hdb1              63885      18    60568      0%   /tmp
/dev/hdb2             127361   77443    43341     64%   /var
/dev/hdb3             634724  421568   180371     70%   /var/spool
/dev/hdb4             385923  236517   129473     65%   /home

As my /usr is quite large, putting swap towards the middle of the disk
would have meant putting it in the 2nd half of the disk, so I opted to put
swap between / and /usr (swap is hda2).

If I had to put them all on one disk (which would necessitate logical
partitions, which I persoanlly detest :) here is the order I would use:

/
/tmp
SWAP
/usr
/opt
/var
/var/spool (This could of course easily be kept as part of /var).
/home

/ is at the start of the disk for speed reasons.

/tmp needs to be in a fast spot for good system performance.

SWAP The idea here is that as the drive head is flying between different
     partitions it shoudl pass over the swap partition and be able to read
     and write stuff there before going on its way.

/usr should be in a fast spot on the disk (towards the beginnning) as it
     contains alot of stuff you want to be able to load quickly (system
     bins, daemons,etc).

/opt has a similar function to /usr but doesn't contain 'system' stuff so
     gets to sit just behind /usr.

/var could use a reasonably fast spot too, so gets to be next.

/home should be on the slowest part of the disk, as speed is not such an
      issue here.

I hope this helps.
Cheers,
	-Robert

--Robert Brockway B.Sc.  Email: robert at blake.humbug.org.au
                                robert at humbug.org.au, r.brockway at uq.net.au
			 WWW:   http://www.humbug.org.au/~robert
			 Founder of HUMBUG (http://www.humbug.org.au)


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