From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 28 17:42:09 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id RAA13858 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:42:09 -0800 (PST) Received: from gdi.uoregon.edu (gdi.uoregon.edu [128.223.170.30]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA13852 for ; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:42:07 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (dwhite@localhost) by gdi.uoregon.edu (8.7.5/8.6.12) with SMTP id RAA01461; Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:42:04 -0800 (PST) Date: Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:42:04 -0800 (PST) From: Doug White Reply-To: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu To: Roger P Johnson cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Disk partioning question/theory/suggestions In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Roger P Johnson wrote: > What advantages is there to partioning a larger disk, say a 2GB drive, > into 2 or more logical drives with each logical drive further divided up into > 1 or more filesystems ? It depends on what you're doing. In most cases, where you're using it for bulk storage, I don't think it does you much good to split it up. If anythying, you split the free space all over the place and end up with "fragmented" partitions, where x is free over here on this filesystem and y free over there and z over there when x+y+z = a significant chunk of the system. There are some instances where you do want to do this, I believe one of them is nfs serving different volumes, since nfs mounts must be on mountpoints. Maybe ????? > How many MBytes for like /usr, /usr/local, /var etc. Here is how I look. Mine is just a plain workstation on a 1gb drive. gdi,ttyp1,~,11>df -k Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Mounted on /dev/wd0a 49231 29419 15874 65% / /dev/wd0e 49231 9670 35623 21% /var /dev/wd0f 824143 420302 337910 55% /usr procfs 4 4 0 100% /proc Plus swap: gdi,ttyp1,~,12>swapinfo Device 1K-blocks Used Avail Capacity Type /dev/wd0b 102400 4636 97700 5% Interleaved > Just for the heck of it, I partioned a 1 GB into 4 logical drives, and each > further down into many filesystems, and it seemed to work. Hmmm.... It'll work, but it'll be inefficient IMHO. There is a case to be made for splitting a "large" filesystem (ie a news spool) across multiple disks & controllers since there is a hardware advantage: Devices can be accessed near-simultaneously on SCSI systems. I'm sure others will have different opionions becasue they actually have years of real-world experience. :-) Doug White | University of Oregon Internet: dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu | Residence Networking Assistant http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite | Computer Science Major