On Thursday 15 January 2004 02:15, Sid Boyce wrote:
With large disks, even Sun have largely phased out chopping them up into smaller disks and symlink hell - space ending up somewhere else. At least AIX with smit got it partly right as you can grow a partition dynamically. I've found that a rogue IDE controller has no respect for partitions and when a HD goes bad, it's bad, so I have on a 160 Gig HD, a / and a swap partition. When I ask guys why the multiple Linux partitions, I've yet to get a coherent answer. Still either way won't have you foul of the DMCA - at least not yet.
Some of the top of my head. 1. If you run out of space and the system can't write to places like /var and /tmp you'll get unusual failures and results. 2. When it comes time to upgrade, you can save yourself a bit of time if /home is on a seperate partition, as it won't need to be restored. 3. My main tower is setup with LVM, but my / and /boot needed to be on standard partitions, but I still want the striping performance on /usr /opt / home etc. (I believe I can create my own initrd to include the LVM drivers, so that / can be on LVM, but I'm using GRUB which I'm fairly sure can't cope with and LVM'd /boot. I don't know if LILO can do this. Basically I'm lazy, and it's quicker and simpler to just split my partitions out.) 4. I can pick different strategies for different areas (i.e. striped partitions for performance (binaries), or mirrored partitions for security (user data), obviously these need to be on seperate disks. It sounds like you have a typical Windows style boxen, with a single large hard drive, probably with standard partition types, and I'm guessing you are the sole user. In this case, yes it makes sense to keep things simple. However I have four HD's spread over 3 different controllers, I can get better performance and functionality because I have things split out. My main system partitions use LVM's split between two disks for speed and flexibilty (dynamic resize of partitions), and the two other disks each have a swap partition on for speeding up VM. -- stephen/dot/boddy/at/btinternet/dot/com