SEO

Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences in partitioning hard
drives larger than 137 GB?

Thank you,

J T Cook

On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 14:29:15 -0700, jmrcook <jmrcook@earthlink.net>
wrote:

>Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences in partitioning hard
>drives larger than 137 GB?
>

I've got a couple drives larger than 137GB. I didn't have any issues
with fdisk, creating partitions in both ext3 and LVM. No partitions
were larger than 137GB, however.

Peter
--
"There are two good teams in Texas. We have the third."
- Charlie Palillo
- Houston Sports Talk radio host 790AM

Make sure your bios is up to date, as some older motherboards need a bios update
or don't support them at all. Assuming your using gentoo, make sure disk-level
software is up to date as well, things like fdisk, mkfs, fsck - these are all
updated on any recent live cd.

In terms of file system, unless you have a compelling need to do otherwise, I'd
recommend ext3 as the file system. Storage space wise it depends on what you
are doing with the system - a large database hosting system is different from a
desktop/day use, which is different from a web server.

~David~

jmrcook wrote:
> Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences in partitioning hard
> drives larger than 137 GB?
>
> Thank you,
>
> J T Cook

Peter Kelly wrote:

>>Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences in partitioning hard
>>drives larger than 137 GB?
>>
>
> I've got a couple drives larger than 137GB. I didn't have any issues
> with fdisk, creating partitions in both ext3 and LVM. No partitions
> were larger than 137GB, however.

No problems here. I have 2 SATA 200GB drives. For some time one of them was
even formatted as single FAT32 partition. Windoze can't FORMAT that, but
can USE it without problems.

I have no problems with FAT, ReiserFS and XFS parts on those disks.

But remember, the bigger the partition is, the more data you loose by
destroying the partition

--
Pawel Kraszewski
www.kraszewscy.net

jmrcook wrote:

> Does anyone have any suggestions or experiences in partitioning hard
> drives larger than 137 GB?
>
> Thank you,
>
> J T Cook
Using gentoo, this is how I partitioned my 80 gig drive:

hda1 10 megs /boot hda2 64 megs swap hda3 64 megs /root
hda5 512 megs /opt hda6 3072 megs /usr hda7 2048 megs /portage
hda8 4096 megs /distfiles hda9 5120 megs /var
hda10 8192 megs /home hda11 remainder of the space used for multimedia
files
hdb1 2112 megs /tmp (old 2 gig seagate drive that still works)

Note that the sizes are set using cfdisk from a live cd during a clean
installation. The critical ones are of course

There's a method to my madness and it's simply this. The primary boot
partitions are placed at the beginning of the drive: These are /boot and /
and while neither have to be very large (currently using 63% of 64megs)
while I'm usually able to get /usr much closer to 95% w/o problems. The one
that really gets a workout in Gentoo is /var but unless you're installing
Open Office from Source, you can get by with 3072 although I'd not use
anything less then 4096 megs for that. In regards to /opt, the only reason
I even have a separate partition is due to optional software that I plan on
installing that isn't a gentoo package. I'm also currently using 50%
of /opt with just my gentoo installation so YMMV.

In regards to /tmp that shouldn't be less then 1024 megs as a single user to
allow for downloads to occur while installing gentoo packages. Now as
to /home, I only keep local docs and normal usage files there and it's the
reason I have the separate partition for multimedia files.

The other advantage is the ability to optimize each partition for the type
of files it will hold. For example, on everything except /multimedia
and /distfiles, I've used the b1024 option to get the smallest block size
while /distfiles & multimedia use the default 4096 blocks. I also use
another option and that's a reduced inodes setting for multimedia.
Basically due to the large file sizes, I decided to reduce the inode count
by about 25%, which actually frees up a fair amount of space for files but
there's a caveat: If in doubt about what an option does, then stick with
the defaults for safety reasons.

In article <ZB2hg.111518$dW3.1672@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com> ,
~David~ <shadoweyez@gmail.com> wrote:

>In terms of file system, unless you have a compelling need to do otherwise, I'd
>recommend ext3 as the file system.

reiserfs is particularly good at dealing with large numbers of files. In
one application, I had directories containing up to 400,000 files each,
and it coped with them quite gracefully.

On Wednesday 05 July 2006 10:38, Lawrence D'Oliveiro stood up and spoke
the following words to the masses in /alt.os.linux.gentoo...:/

> In article <ZB2hg.111518$dW3.1672@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com> ,
> ~David~ <shadoweyez@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>In terms of file system, unless you have a compelling need to do
>>otherwise, I'd recommend ext3 as the file system.
>
> reiserfs is particularly good at dealing with large numbers of files.
> In one application, I had directories containing up to 400,000 files
> each, and it coped with them quite gracefully.

To which I would like to add that I use /xfs/ as the filesystem on this
machine (and /reiserfs/ on my laptop).

/ext3/ is reliable and time-proven, but while it may be the easiest to
repair in the event of filesystem damage, I find /xfs/ and /reiserfs/
to yield a far better performance.

One's mileage may vary, as always... ;-)

--
With kind regards,

*Aragorn*
(Registered GNU/Linux user # 223157)