[H-GEN] partition advice

[davidj at amh.com.au]

On Mon, Feb 22, 1999 at 12:56:31PM +1000, Robert Brockway wrote:

> 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

Well, personally I'd follow the idea behind the OS/2 HPFS file system.

The primary FAT, or primary superblock is in the center of the drive, and
using some form of tree, get to anywhere in the disk in minimum _average_
time. The theory behind this is the disk heads are on average, located
in the center of the platters. 

So I'd do

/home
/usr
/
SWAP
/tmp
/var

Of course it all depends on what function the machine serves. If it
where say a web server (on a single disk), and the html was in /home,
I'd put /home in the middle. Obviously this sort of layout would be
most beneficial given a SCSI device.

> 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.

That'd only help if you happened to have a SCSI disk with tag queuing or
an IDE disk that was arranged in the optimal manner for the linux
filesystem code. Wishful thinking with cheapo IDE disks.

The linux filesystem code does do some elementary tag queuing, but 
the efficieny of it depends greatly on the actual layout of the sectors
over the platter(s).

-- 
David Jericho
          

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