From owner-freebsd-questions  Fri Feb  9 10:30:45 2001
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Date: Fri, 09 Feb 2001 13:30:07 -0500
From: Bob Johnson <bob@eng.ufl.edu>
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To: Ben_Calvert@amsinc.com, questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: how big a partition is too big?
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> 
> Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 16:56:25 -0800
> From: Ben_Calvert@amsinc.com
> Subject: how big a partition is too big?
> 
> am building a file server with 90 G of storage (2x 45gig on a highpoint raid 0)
> , and would like to keep this partitioned as few times as possible.  is there a
> point when i run out of inodes or something?  maybe a better question is, what's
> an ideal partition size ? should i tune this by hand, or are default settings
> ok?
> 

The right answer to this really depends on things like the 
average file size that you expect and the number of files 
you will have in the average directory.

The only time I've had problems is when I filled up a disk 
with a bunch of small files; I ran out of inodes before the 
disk was full.  If your files end up being larger on average 
than you expect, you waste disk space on the unused inodes, 
and if your files are smaller than you expect, you waste 
disk space by running out of inodes before it is full. If 
you already have a good idea of what the statistics for your 
filesytem are likely to be, then you might gain something 
by hand tuning.

My understanding is that UFS is not too wonderful when 
faced with a huge number of files per directory.  I don't 
have personal experience with that, but you might want to 
look in to the implications.

I would mount the data stuff as a separate filesystem 
from the operating system stuff.  This helps both when 
doing backups and when doing upgrades.

- Bob


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