From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Dec 23 13:20:29 2000 From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Dec 23 13:20:27 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id CDFA737B400 for ; Sat, 23 Dec 2000 13:20:26 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 20331 invoked by uid 100); 23 Dec 2000 21:20:25 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14917.5913.572573.40244@guru.mired.org> Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 15:20:25 -0600 (CST) To: Tim McMillen Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Root Partitions In-Reply-To: <53661978@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Tim McMillen types: > Ok, I've seen this recommendation a lot now. Is this because the > ffs filesystem is so much more robust now than it was? Because reading > through the 4.4BSD SMM it strongly recommends different partitions to > guard against problems in one filesystem taking out the whole system. > As a home user, downtime really doesn't matter to me. I make backups and > if I had to reinstall due to filesystem corruption, I would be fine. But > I like to understand the security and reliability implications of what I > do. So I take it separate filesystems are not as necessary as they > once were? Thanks, It's a combination of things. ffs is more robust than it used to be. Disk drives have higher MTBFs than they used to. Downtime for a home system is less expensive than it was for the timesharing systems that were common when the SMM was originally written. All of these add up to the expected pain of a disk failure with single large partitions being lower than the expected pain of running with multiple smaller partitions, making a single partition the better bet for system software. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message