Linux Partitioning

[anonymous23323124]

I'm about to reinstall my Linux setup. I've read a lot of varied advice on the internet regarding the best way to set up one's various partitions (e.g. just / and swap, or /boot, swap, /, /usr, /home, etc).

So before I make my decision, I thought I'd ask other forum members how you've set things up.

I'm planning on using a 2TB hard drive. However, there's also a 750GB in there - on which I intend to install Windows. Does it make sense to split the Linux partitions between drives for performance?

Thanks,
Xander

[Catfish]

Not unless you're running more than one at the same time.[/joke]

(inb4 virtual machines. No, even then you're still really running one OS.)

[Cheraphy]

I'd expect that spreading the partitions across separate drives would hinder the performance.

[chrisname]

@xander337,
Actually it's often for performance reasons that people do it. /etc will usually contain lots of small files in a few directories, not nested very deep. ReiserFS is good for that (though I refuse to use it because Hans Reiser is in prison for murdering his wife).

Xander314 wrote:

So before I make my decision, I thought I'd ask other forum members how you've set things up.

Personally I have
/dev/sda - 2 TB
|- /dev/sda1 - C: or /mnt/windows - ntfs - 500 GB
|- /dev/sda2 - DOS extended:
|`- /dev/sda3 - /boot - ext2 - 2 GB
|`- /dev/sda4 - / or /mnt/archlinux - ext4 - 100 GB
|`- /dev/sda5 - / or /mnt/linuxmint - ext4 - 100 GB
|`- /dev/sda6 - no mount point - ext4 - 100 GB
|`- /dev/sda7 - /home/chris - ext4 - 1024 GB
|`- /dev/sda8 - swap - swapfs - 8 GB
|- /dev/sda9 - unallocated - nothing - 29 GB
I really need to redo it.

Currently both Linux installations are messed up. Linux Mint broke itself (When Updates Go Bad (for no apparent reason)) and Arch Linux has no working video driver (switched out ATi card for nVIDIA one, Arch was the only OS that didn't auto-detect the new card and load the driver, if Mint was working I could chroot into Arch and fix it but Mint isn't working so I can't) cannot into WiFi and I have no wired connection.

I'm just gonna install Ubuntu on top of both of them and hope for the best.

Xander314 wrote:

Does it make sense to split the Linux partitions between drives for performance?

I wouldn't have thought so. Personally, I would put my home directory on the 2 TB drive and then put 2 primary partitions and 1 extended partition on the 750 GB hard drive.

1. Windows (350 GB)
2. Extended (350 GB):
a) Boot - ext2 - 2 GB
b) Linux 1 - ext4 - 170 GB
c) Linux 2 - ext4 - 170 GB (optional; you can also divide this into 4 ext4 partitions of 85 GB each)
d) Swap - swap - 8 GB
3. Extra (50 GB) (optional; put something like FreeBSD here)

Unless you're running a server you don't need a particularly clever partition layout with different filesystems for every partition. I use ext2 for /boot because GRUB only supports ext2 (ext3 and 4 are backwards compatible but I like to use ext2 anyway) and ext4 for everything else because it's fast and has journalling capabilities.

I always leave some space at the end for an extra OS if I want one. It always goes at the end otherwise every time I create or delete a partition it will affect the ones after it in GRUB (hd0,1 becomes hd0,2 and vice versa).

[Cheraphy]

@Chris,

Partitioning is beneficial, but I would think putting them on physically separate drives would cause problems.

[helios]

ReiserFS is good for that (though I refuse to use it because Hans Reiser is in prison for murdering his wife).

Come on, do you actually believe that? It was obviously a set up by the ext* people to promote their own inferior software.

Partitioning is beneficial, but I would think putting them on physically separate drives would cause problems.

I don't see why it would. A single SATA 2 bus has more than enough bandwidth to handle simultaneous I/O with two or three drives.

[moorecm]

In my experience, I like /home as a separate partition that I can backup easily.

[anonymous23323124]

chisname wrote:

Xander314 wrote:
Does it make sense to split the Linux partitions between drives for performance?

I wouldn't have thought so. Personally, I would put my home directory on the 2 TB drive and then put 2 primary partitions and 1 extended partition on the 750 GB hard drive.

Just to be clear (I didn't phrase it very well last time), when I said "split the Linux partitions between drives" my intention was /home on one, system stuff on the other. By "Linux partitions" I meant non windows partitions, rather than Linux system partitions ;)

Do you intend 'Linux 1' and 'Linux 2' to be for two different distributions?

Perhaps I should add some detail: the main Linux OS I want to use is Gentoo. However, as most people use Ubuntu I want Linux Mint (not Ubuntu itself for trademark reasons) installed so I can record tutorials in it. I was going to put Mint on a crappy old 120GB IDE in there, as I wouldn't be using it extensively, but do you think it makes more sense just to put that on the 750GB as well?

[rapidcoder]

ReiserFS is good for that (though I refuse to use it because Hans Reiser is in prison for murdering his wife).
Come on, do you actually believe that? It was obviously a set up by the ext* people to promote their own inferior software.

And do you believe ReiserFS is really better than ext4?
I've seen some benchmarks, and there were no obvious, significant performance differences between ext3, ReiserFS, JFS and other journalling filesystems. So I doubt it very much. And ReiserFS has bad reputation as for its stability - it is much harder to recover it than ext* systems.

Solaris ZFS is years ahead of probably all Linux filesystems, IMHO.

[chrisname]

Xander314 wrote:

Do you intend 'Linux 1' and 'Linux 2' to be for two different distributions?

Yeah but they don't have to be, that's just how I do it. You can split the 340 GB as many ways as you like.

rapidcoder wrote:

Solaris ZFS is years ahead of probably all Linux filesystems, IMHO.

How so? I remember reading something about it and thinking it sounded good but I don't remember any specifics.