Disk Partition Percentage

[deadpoint]

partitioning generally does not hurt performance, the underlying 
hardwear, the filesystem, and filesystem mount options can hurt 
performance. the filesystem and mount options again depend on what the 
system will be going. for a desktop system it doesn't really matter. if 
you're setting up a mail server that's going to see lots of read and 
writes this brings up other considerations.

backup and recover is always a fun topic. the first questions is what do 
  you need to backup? i personally only care about configuration files 
that i've changed, logs, and whatever data the computer serves up, 
email, user file, etc. i setup all my systems identically with AutoYasT 
SuSE's auto installer so i really need the configs and data.

using raid depends on what the availability of the system needs to be, 
who is effected if the resourse is not there? at work our fileserver 
needs to be up nearly all the time. on this system i've mirrored all the 
OS filesystems includeing swap across two SCA scsi disks. in the event 
of a disk failure the system runs in degraded mode. all the files this 
system serves are on a hardware array running raid5. the array itself, a 
hitachi 9570 has no single point of failure, every component is 
redundant. granted you'll not likely to see this for a home system, it's 
just an example.

> 
> When does partitioning hurt performance?  I seem to remember you and Bob 
> mentioning that when I set up my system.
> 
> Also, coming from the very old days when big partitions were bad, I 
> still think about making each partition the size it needs to be (and no 
> bigger) to make backup/maintenance (such as dump/restore) easier.  Since 
> you and others don't seem to think that way, could you briefly touch on 
> how you handle reliability/recovery/backup.  Is it mostly a raid/disk 
> mirroring issue these days?
> 
> Joe
> 
> Cyber Source wrote:
> 
>> This one is gonna get some response. I like to keep it simple. Alot of 
>> guys like to keep separate partitions for /home and stuff. I prefer 
>> the way RedHat does for normal desktops and that is with a /boot 
>> partition a / partition and a swap partition. Then you only need to 
>> dump the /boot and / partitions. Any changes needed later can be made 
>> with symbolic links or in /etc/fstab for different locations to 
>> different drives, etc. That can be change a hell of alot easier than 
>> moving partitions around on a drive, and since changes can be made so 
>> easily with sym links and the /etc/fstab file, it kind of makes it a 
>> moot point. IMHO
>>
>> Frank Kumro wrote:
>>
>>> I am wanting to dump my current disk setup which consists of a swap
>>> partition and a / partition. What other partitions would I need to
>>> create? (i want home seperate and what else???). Also what percentages
>>> should I use for disk space for each partition? I say percentages
>>> because I have many machines which I would like to add these changes
>>> too however they all vary in size. Thanks again guys!
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>>
>