[ale] Partitions

[jeff hubbs]

> OK...let's take this a step further.  Unless you have multiple physical
> drives to spread your filesystems out over, what advantage is there to
> breaking it up at all?  


There is the issue of leaving a partition available just for the storage 
  of your data.  That's a very smart thing to do because, like people 
here have said, you can redo your whole Linux installation and leave 
that data partition untouched.


> There is no speed advantage as you are bound by
> head movement on a single drive.  


Oh, maybe just a *little*.  I try to stick my swap partition in the 
middle range of cylinders to try to reduce "head fling."  For general 
desktop use, though, what's the hardest thing on drives?  Wouldn't it be 
app launching followed by swapping (if you do much swapping)?  What 
could be done partition-wise to speed up, oh, StarOffice's launching (he 
wonders aloud)?

> There may be advantage in that you can
> limit disk space allocation and usage, but this adds administrative
> overhead.  


Yeah, and not to mention, you can paint yourself into a corner 
space-wise.  you could ask yourself, what might I write lots of data to 
- conceivably enough to fill up a partition - where I might make where 
the OS can't write to /var anymore?  That would be bad.


> There would not be any advantage in terms of backup / restore
> unlkess you are mirroring logical drives (which goes back to the single
> vs multiple drives question).
> 
> Comments?
> 
> 
> 




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