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Date:      Mon, 28 Oct 1996 17:42:04 -0800 (PST)
From:      Doug White <dwhite@gdi.uoregon.edu>
To:        Roger P Johnson <hirsh@skypoint.com>
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Disk partioning question/theory/suggestions
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.3.94.961028173723.1431D-100000@gdi.uoregon.edu>
In-Reply-To: <m0vH0Ro-00029qC@mirage.skypoint.com>

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On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Roger P Johnson wrote:

>    What advantages is there to partioning a larger disk, say a 2GB drive,
> into 2 or more logical drives with each logical drive further divided up into
> 1 or more filesystems ?

It depends on what you're doing.  In most cases, where you're using it for
bulk storage, I don't think it does you much good to split it up.  If
anythying, you split the free space all over the place and end up with
"fragmented" partitions, where x is free over here on this filesystem and
y free over there and z over there when x+y+z = a significant chunk of the
system.

There are some instances where you do want to do this, I believe one of
them is nfs serving different volumes, since nfs mounts must be on
mountpoints.  Maybe ?????

>    How many MBytes for like /usr, /usr/local, /var etc.

Here is how I look.  Mine is just a plain workstation on a 1gb drive.

gdi,ttyp1,~,11>df -k
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a       49231    29419    15874    65%    /
/dev/wd0e       49231     9670    35623    21%    /var
/dev/wd0f      824143   420302   337910    55%    /usr
procfs              4        4        0   100%    /proc

Plus swap:

gdi,ttyp1,~,12>swapinfo
Device      1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Type
/dev/wd0b      102400     4636    97700     5%    Interleaved

>    Just for the heck of it, I partioned a 1 GB into 4 logical drives, and each
> further down into many filesystems, and it seemed to work. Hmmm....

It'll work, but it'll be inefficient IMHO.

There is a case to be made for splitting a "large" filesystem (ie a news
spool) across multiple disks & controllers since there is a hardware
advantage:  Devices can be accessed near-simultaneously on SCSI systems. 

I'm sure others will have different opionions becasue they actually have
years of real-world experience.  :-)

Doug White                              | University of Oregon  
Internet:  dwhite@resnet.uoregon.edu    | Residence Networking Assistant
http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~dwhite    | Computer Science Major




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