[ale] one or many...

[Jeff Hubbs]

I fiddle around with this sort of thing quite a bit, in part because I'm
often working with old machines, slow IDE interfaces, and small drives. 
Yes, there are security reasons for splitting up partitions as described
and those are quite valid.  Often, however, I'm trying to make
intolerably slow machines tolerable and one of the ways I do that is by
putting different parts of the filesystem tree on different
partitions/drives.  

If you partition like mad on a single drive, know that the disk is going
to spend a lot of time sailing from partition to partition trying to get
its crap done (note:  I'm assuming that partitions on a single drive,
which to you are divided by cylinder boundaries, are in fact physically
arrayed on the disk in a cylindrical fashion; in this day and age, what
actually goes on the platters may be so highly abstracted to the point
where that isn't really true anymore).  

If the machine will get into swapping territory, this can hurt you
really badly, especially if the thing you're doing that puts you into
that regime is also trying to do lots of reads and writes.  As much as
possible, I try to put things on *different physical drives* and on
*different controllers* if I know those partitions are going to be
accessed at the same time frequently.  Drives with more physical heads
and that spin faster are going to move data faster than those with less
heads and slower spin rates.  

On a machine with high RAM impact, I will often want to put the swap
partition on a disk on its own controller and share that disk with
partitions that don't get accessed much, like /boot and parts of /usr.  

- Jeff

On Wed, 2003-12-31 at 15:23, Stephen Leonard wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2003 at 02:04:32PM -0600, Preston Boyington wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Jim Popovitch [mailto:jimpop at yahoo.com]
> > > Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2003 1:40 PM
> > > To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
> > > Subject: [ale] one or many...
> > > 
> > > 
> > > ...partitions that is.
> > > 
> > > OK, a swap partition is nice to have, but what does everyone think of 
> > > having everything else in a single big partition (assume Desktop PC) 
> > > versus a separate / /usr /boot /home /var, etc.
> > > 
> > > -Jim P.
> > > 
> > 
> > i prefer seperate partitions.  it gives me a little more confidence when i'm
> > screwing around with something i don't know much about.  at least my /home
> > is relatively safe.  other than that i like seperates in case something
> > happens and a bunch of log files get written (from system being hacked?)
> > that way my "/" partition doesn't get "clogged up" and cause my system to
> > reboot.
> 
> Here's another security concious reason to separate partitions:
> 
> http://www.hackinglinuxexposed.com/articles/20031214.html
> 
> stephen
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-- 
Jeff Hubbs <hbbs at comcast.net>