From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Sep 15 09:21:00 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DC92C1065672 for ; Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:21:00 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from f92902@hushmail.com) Received: from smtp10.hushmail.com (smtp10.hushmail.com [65.39.178.143]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C43FD8FC14 for ; Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:21:00 +0000 (UTC) Received: from smtp10.hushmail.com (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) by smtp10.hushmail.com (Postfix) with SMTP id E4E34BEE11 for ; Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:19:15 +0000 (UTC) X-Hush-Verified-Domain: hushmail.com Received: from smtp.hushmail.com (w4.hushmail.com [65.39.178.50]) by smtp10.hushmail.com (Postfix) with ESMTP for ; Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:19:11 +0000 (UTC) Received: by smtp.hushmail.com (Postfix, from userid 99) id 60BAD10E2D6; Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:19:11 +0000 (UTC) MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 05:19:11 -0400 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org From: f92902@hushmail.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Message-Id: <20110915091911.60BAD10E2D6@smtp.hushmail.com> Subject: Re: FreeBSD 8.2 Partition Sizing question X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:21:00 -0000 > There is nothing wrong with having / and /usr on separate partitions; in fact, there are some mild advantages to fine-grained partitioning for folks who pay attention to their filesystem space usage. To elaborate on this: Assuming you have separate /var, /tmp, /usr and /home partitions, the only files that should be on / are: 1. Part of base system not in /usr 2. Kernels (/boot/kernel) 3. root home directory (/root) Therefore the size of / does not grow with time on most systems. It also tends to be independent of what the system is used for, unlike the size of /usr for example. On my systems / is between 1.5 gb to 2 gb depending on overall disk size. /usr is up to 10 gb on desktop systems. A benefit of having / on its own partition is that it becomes much harder to run / out of disk space by accident. Checking out source trees (/usr/ports, /usr/src), building world (/usr/obj), building ports (/usr/ports), running software that uses /usr/local//logs for storing its log files, etc. all have potential to write to /usr if you don't have appropriate configuration/symlinks/partitions set up to redirect them to the right places. If your /usr is separate from / then running out of disk space on /usr is usually harmless.