From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed May 11 19:33:23 2005 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C7FF516A4CE for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 19:33:23 +0000 (GMT) Received: from out1.smtp.messagingengine.com (out1.smtp.messagingengine.com [66.111.4.25]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 513AF43D48 for ; Wed, 11 May 2005 19:33:23 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from d@donnacha.com) Received: from frontend3.messagingengine.com (frontend3.internal [10.202.2.152]) by frontend1.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 20025C8DC46; Wed, 11 May 2005 15:33:21 -0400 (EDT) X-Sasl-enc: KxmWgwh+Ytmz2+9A20emO2jWicnme1NsndEripSuEeNZ 1115840001 Received: from [127.0.0.1] (82-41-213-217.cable.ubr12.edin.blueyonder.co.uk [82.41.213.217]) by frontend3.messagingengine.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B4B1A88; Wed, 11 May 2005 15:33:20 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <42825F50.4040007@donnacha.com> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 20:38:56 +0100 From: freebsd.org@donnacha.com User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (Windows/20041206) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <42822285.9050402@donnacha.com> <42823AB1.3050704@mac.com> <42824021.9000108@donnacha.com> <42824476.4090404@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <42824476.4090404@mac.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: jerrymc@clunix.cl.msu.edu Subject: Re: I need further HDD advice before submitting order. X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 19:33:23 -0000 Chuck and Jerry, thank you so much. Chuck - I'm going to take your advice on setting up some kind of mirror, software RAID or whatever, thanks. Jerry - that breakdown of how you would allocate space was amazing - seriously, a better division and a better explanation than anything I've found in the FreeBSD books. The idea of allocating almost the entire 2nd drive to /spill is great, that will give me all the flexibility I need, brilliant! Some > One more thing to think about is the possibility of creating a raid (mirror) > for critical things. That would give you some security in case of a > disk crash. In that case you would need to put your critical stuff > on the smaller drive and carve out an identical size piece on the large > one to be its mirror partner. Check out vinum(8). That, of necessity, > would make your allocation scheme look quite different. Can I provide that space from within /spill i.e. without having to set up a seperate partition, or would I be better off just creating an 80GB partition for that on the 2nd drive, to be named and mounted as soon as I learn enough to implement RAID/mirroring/Vinum? That would leave me with the following: On the 80 GB drive /root 1 GB swap 2.5 GB /tmp 2 GB /usr 5 GB /var 5 GB /home All the rest On the 200 GB drive swap 2.5 GB /mirror Same size as the actual size of the 1st disk, 65GB or whatever. /spill All the rest Does that make sense? I guess that, as my usage grows, I'll be shifting things over with a mind to both disk use balance and space, do you reckon those factors will be fairly easy to work out? From your suggestion that I can symlink stuff over to /spill with a reasonably fine granularity i.e. /var/spool and/or /var/db etc, I get the impression that it will be. Do symlink cause any sort of performance hit? Or rather, any meaningful performance hit? Thanks, Donnacha