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Date:      Fri, 23 Apr 1999 10:43:44 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu
Cc:        "Marcel R. Wingate" <MWingate@cbm-wa.com>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Harddrives & Filesystems
Message-ID:  <19990423104344.H91260@freebie.lemis.com>
In-Reply-To: <199904222037.QAA19535@cc03du.unity.ncsu.edu>; from rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu on Thu, Apr 22, 1999 at 04:37:50PM -0400
References:  <B704930A444AD111944F00600892E8A812AF0E@CBM-NT1> <199904222037.QAA19535@cc03du.unity.ncsu.edu>

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On Thursday, 22 April 1999 at 16:37:50 -0400, rdkeys@unity.ncsu.edu wrote:
>>
>> I have 2 Harddrives in my system and would like some input as to how to
>> allocate the file systems (/, /usr, /var, swap, etc)
>>
>> I have a 500Mb IDE Harddrive and a 2GB SCSI harddrive
>> The system is a P90, 32Mb RAM (plan to go to 64Mb soon, so I want to have
>> enough swap).
>
> Usually 1-2x is sufficient for swap, so use 128mb for swap.

I'd recommend about 256 MB for swap.  In view of the small first disk,
I'd put about 64 MB on the first disk and 192 MB on the second disk.
The ratio of main memory to swap is not so important, but you should
have at least one swap partition slightly larger than main memory so
that you can take crash dumps.

> Use about 64mb for root.

That's generous, but not too much.

> Use about 32mb for var.

If you *must* use a separate /var file system, calculate the size you
will need.  If you don't know how to do that, you don't need /var.

> Use the rest of the first drive for usr.

Agreed.

> Use the second drive for your space, typically home or usr/home.

I'd recommend /home.

> If you add a third drive, and add lots of sofware, you might want
> to put it on /usr/local or /usr/src.
>
> With the above scheme, drives are flopping all over on their head
> actuators.

I'm not sure I understand this statement.  Anyway, in this
configuration you'll find that you'll need some symlinks from /usr to
/home, particularly /usr/local.  I'd make /var a symlink to /home/var.

One other thing: use FreeBSD 3.1 or 3.2, and enable DMA on your IDE
drive if the hardware supports it.  It makes an incredible difference
in performance.

Greg
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