Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 17:56:48 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Greg Black <gjb-freebsd@gba.oz.au> Cc: Doug White <dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu>, "Michael E. Mercer" <mmercer@ipass.net>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: How to partition my hard drives. Message-ID: <19990410175648.M2142@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <19990410074630.23423.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>; from Greg Black on Sat, Apr 10, 1999 at 05:46:29PM %2B1000 References: <370E7816.2D6F3285@ipass.net> <Pine.BSF.4.03.9904091640540.28562-100000@resnet.uoregon.edu> <19990410101856.A2142@lemis.com> <19990410074630.23423.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>
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On Saturday, 10 April 1999 at 17:46:29 +1000, Greg Black wrote: > Greg Lehey writes: > >>>> I am excited, I will be getting a dual pentium 450 machine, >>>> with 2 8G hard drives. I would like some advice as to how I should >>>> partition the 2 drives. >>> >>> However you want. :-) I would suggest a separate / (~200MB or so), >> >> I'd suggest that's overly generous. In the future, debug kernels may >> become the norm, so it's probably reasonable to make / 60 or 70 MB. > > Does this advice mean you've backed away from the idea of > running a single big / partition with all the OS stuff on it, or > have I misunderstood what you were recommending previously? No, I have always said that I would make an exception in the case of the root file system, but with relatively small disks (<= 1 GB) it might make more sense to just have one partition for both. >>> then make the rest giant partitions. If you want to have shared >>> space for NFSing or to make backups easier, you can hip it up into >>> chunks. >> >> Put a swap partition on each drive (128 MB on each) and make the rest >> of each drive a single file system. If I were doing this, I'd call >> the second file system on the first disk /usr, and the file system on >> the second disk /home. > > The way I would do this would be to put a 256 MB swap on each > drive (unless you have more than 256 MB of memory, in which case > I'd make each swap partition physical memory + 2 MB), and leave > the rest of the drive as a single partition, with / (and all the > OS stuff) on the first disk and /home (or whatever you want to > call it) on the second. I don't think you need that much swap, but it always pays to err on the side of generosity. A good point about the size of physical memory, though: at least one swap partition should be that big, because otherwise you can't take crash dumps. > If I had that size disks and I was using backup media that could > not manage a level 0 dump of that size and I was in a situation > where regular level 0 dumps were important, I'd make partition > sizes suit my backup media -- but I'm not much of a believer in > regular level 0 dumps, so I might not make such a decision even > then. Again, a good point. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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