[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bill Broadley (bill at cse.ucdavis.edu):

> You mean the easy steps where you take a default install with 3 ish
> partitions, then predict the future needs for 7-8 partitions and then tweak
> the journal or lack or, various mount flags, and partitioning ordering to
> minimize seeks?

Even a half-assed attempt at reducing average seek time/distance is 
radically better than none at all.  Lowest-hanging fruit in this 
case might be something like this:

o  Root partition taking up the first 40% of the drive.
o  Swap taking up some reasonable size, in the middle of the drive.
o  Var partition taking up the rest.

Anyhow, I spent about twenty minutes originally planning the partition
map of the linuxmafia.com server box that was ultimately destroyed
by a power spike during a severe wind storm this past April -- and then
about eight years running it.  You'd suggest I'd have been smarter to be
penny wise and pound foolish by not bothering?  Really?

And, I forgot to mention earlier:  It's hardly just performance that
benefits from seek optimisation.  Hard drive _life_ will (statistically
speaking) be greatly extended by the greatly reduced wear:  It's only
one data point, but the two 9GB SCSI2 drives killed by power spike, in
April, had been in continuous service for 11 years.

> That's not _easy_ in my book, especially since the very act of doing
> so makes it more likely that additional tweaks will be needed in the
> future.

You know, I _can_ recall having made occasional miscalculations about
filesystem size.   Fortunately, I hadn't forgotten how the "ln -s" 
command works.  ;-> 

(In one case, I actually did make the root filesystem too small, but
that became apparent within about ten minutes of installing the needed
software, so the obvious remedy was to blow it away and do it right.)