Harddisk and filesystem matters

[villerk]

I'm running Slackware 8.0 and I'm going to buy a new 60 GB disk in a couple of weeks time. I was just wondering how to partition it. My other disk is 20 GB Maxtor. Which directories should I put to which disk? The 60 GB disk might be a bit faster than my old 20 GB, but there shouldn't much difference. I was thinking of a structure like this:

60 GB:

• /boot 10 MB
• / ~8 GB
• /usr/local ~52 GB

20 GB:

• /home 2 GB
• /tmp 50 MB
• swap 256 MB
• /usr/local/music 17+ GB

(Note that I currently have about 9 gigs of free MP3's and I'm about to download even more, so it's good to have a big partition for them... ) Any comments or suggestions?

Another matter is filesystems. I'm currently using ext2, but I'm kind of interested in reiserfs. It's supposedly as fast and even faster than ext2 and has a better error recovery. Is it worth switching to it?

[leech]

ReiserFS is rather nice, though I couldn't help you with suggestions on the other points. I usually just have a / and a swap.

Leech

[Colin Morey]

I'd be tempted to do,

60 GB:

• /boot 10MB
• / ~8GB
• /usr/local ~10GB
• /usr/local/music/ ~40GB
• Swap 512Mb

20 GB:

• swap 512Mb
• /home 10 GB
• /tmp ~10GB

as for the FS, i use ext3 now,.. its backwardly compatible and speed isn't too bad.

[villerk]

Just wondering... how do you use your /tmp? I have seldom needed bigger than 20 MB...

[rugger]

Yuck, too complex

villerk,

why make /usr/local so big?

In all honestly, I would,

60GB disk:

• 20meg /boot (only if you need it for you computer, you most likely wont)
• 256meg swap
• 40GB /
• 20GB /home

20GB disk:

• 256meg swap
• 19+ meg /usr/local/music

Or maybe
60GB disk:

• 20meg /boot (only if you need it for you computer, you most likely wont)
• 256meg swap
• 40GB /usr/local/music
• 20GB /

20GB disk:

• 256meg swap
• 19+ meg /home

I usually consider simplicity to be the best, and often find overpartitioning leads to problems down the road that are difficult to fix without repartitioning the whole drive.

Also, if you haven't installed logrotate on your slackware 8 yet, you probably should.

[villerk]

Yes, I know overpartitioning leads sometimes to serious problems, but how can I avoid it if I use two disks of different size?

Why are all of you telling me I should make that much swap space ? I have 256 MB ram, and only after hours of use does the computer start using the swap. (I currently have 256 MB only.) I never have run out of it (read my lips: yet )

BTW What are you talking about? What is logrotate?

[rugger]

I don't mean that you shouldn't have partitions, just don't bother partitioning any more than you need to.

You should have lots of swap because:

1) you have lots of harddrive space (so you can)
2) having swap space on both drives will improve swap performace.
3) Linux 2.4 (for versions 2.4.X where X < 10) run better with swap of 2x ram, since they preswap aggressively. 2.4.10 got a new VM that didn't preswap as aggressively and doesn't have this requirement.

I actually can agree with you about ram usage. I ussually never seriously have to use swap on my system either (384meg), even with kde running and kde compiling at the same time!

Logrotate is a program that rotates your system logs for you when you want them to, so your log files don't become too large. You can download a binary package for it from redhat. Simply use rpm2tgz and install it. Then have it run dayly at midnight from root's crontab. And then configure it to rotate logs in /var/log. Slackware really should have this pre-installed, but you know slackware, minimalist to the point where I love it.

I can send you a slackware configuration for it later if you want (probably tomorrow, since I cannot get remote access to the site it is at anymore, due to policy changes)

[kewlcat]

RAID for swap!

villerk,

Since you have the space , why not make 2 equal sized partitions on the drives and get some software RAID0 going? You might want to do that for some of your other partitions that need the performance -- not the music one of course .

-Rahul

[villerk]

Hmmm, not a bad idea at all, but it would make more sense if I had two (or more ) identical drives.

why make /usr/local so big?

I've used Linux for over four years now, but I still haven't been able to find out where to put all my stuff (like videos, music, etc). I can't put them to /home/villerk as no-one else would then be able to use them so I've used /usr/local/music, /usr/local/graphics etc.

Just crossed my mind: I could make my old 20 GB disk a backup drive, you know, I could use cron to copy the most important files to it...?

[rugger]

use:

/home/share/music
/home/share/graphics

ect, so that when you reinstall a new version of linux, you can simply move the home partition with you to the new distribution of linux and not worry about moving your shared data with it.

[Wombat]

You won't need a /boot with the newer Lilo or Grub.
I would only put the swap on the 60GB if it is indeed faster. 256MB isn't very much space (HD wise), and speaking as a fellow who has had his machine lock up when it ran out of swap, it's not worth trying to save a hundred megs or so.

I have:
/
/home
/mpeg

/mpeg is FAT32, since this is a dual boot, that lets Windows see all my music/video. I would have a big /home, too. I have a /home/XFree for compiling XFree for Matrox. I also have /home/downloads. When I want to screw around with my system, I just nuke the / partition, and leave /home where it is.

ReiserFS is cool, but I don't know if it's "done" yet. You could use ext2/ext3.

But really, don't do /usr/local/music. At least do /home/music, if not /music.

I think /tmp should be bigger (Some programs use it heavily - such as downloading large files, and I use it for play space), but I would do that by just letting it be on /, and not its own partition.

[rugger]

Reiserfs is cool, and pretty much done, despite the ranting of Hans Reiser

It insanely quick precessing large numbers of files.

[villerk]

Here's a little summary of all suggestions.

60 GB:

• swap 512 MB
• /home 59+ GB

20 GB:

• / 20 GB

There's just this one problem: I kind of hate doing my root (/) so big, as my current installation of Slackware and a _LOT_ of other stuff take only about 2 gigs, so I'd be having (at least) over fifteen gigs of useless space. Also the 20 GB is a tad slower and I kind of like the / to be on a fast disk.

So, a better one would in my opinion be

60 GB:

• swap 512 MB
• / ~6 GB
• /home 53+ MB

20 GB:

• /home/something_or_other
• /home/music 12-15 GB

BTW Here are some numbers. 60 GB (Seagate U6): seek time 8.9 ms, buffer 2 MB. 20 GB (Maxtor DiamondMax VL20): seek time 9.5 ms, buffer 512 kB. The Seagate still feels helluva lot faster than it's 'supposed' to be...

BTW2 I tried to post this two days ago, but the server was probably down.

[Wombat]

That should work fairly well. I might even suggest making the 20GB drive a FAT32 setup. That way you can easily pull out the drive and put it somewhere else if you want to move data around. And you don't need the fastest possible filesystem for MP3s and such.

You could even mount the partition as read-only, and that would protect the data quite well. Then, just have root access to change the contents of that hard drive. That's how my MP3's work. Everybody can look, nobody can touch.

[thop]

It insanely quick precessing large numbers of files.

yes Reiser FS is fast for directories with many files - small files. the bigger the files get the slower Reiser FS gets. >100kb = bye ReiserFS. >1MB = bye bye ReiserFS. so if you got many mp3 files or big archives try XFS - it simply rocks for large files (>1MB). the larger the file the better the performance compared to Reiser and others.
try unpacking a 200MB file on ReiserFS and then on XFS - you will be amazed. but then XFS is _much_ slower on small files (<10kb). guess you can't have all

ReiserFS on all "normal" partitions (it makes squid fly), XFS where the big files are (mp3 etc).