[vox-tech] Need Partitioning Advice

[Rick Moen]

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

> 3 partitions is IMO quite reasonable, 8 much less so.

You're entitled to you opinion, but studying and understanding the
system's local nature and needs dictates what makes sense.  My current
server has about that many data-bearing filesystems arranged across a
mirrored RAID1 pair and a separate single drive.  Every one of those
filesystems has a system-specific reason for existing, and for existing
separately from the others.

The reasons are various.  You can read Karsten's page to read about many
and perhaps all.  Minimising seek is of course merely one objective (a
point we'll return to, briefly, later).

> Although I find splitting root and /var kind of strange.  Wouldn't
> that increase your seeks quite a bit.

No, quite the opposite, if you do it right.


> Heh, statically greatly extended sounds like more of a WAG[1] to me.  Sure
> less seeks = less wear, not to mention more perf.  However saying that your
> drive will die when seek distance = X seems wildly overstated.

That and the fact that I'm not an idiot would be why I did _not_ so state. 


> I suspect there are numbers much more significant factors like temp,
> vibration, power on hours, etc.

If I were taking the time to brief you about all aspects of system care,
I would be telling you primarily about preventing head buildup.


> Do you know of any papers correlating seek number and distance
> with disk life?

No, I am not going to be dredging up research for you.


> I read a statical analysis that google published on some
> ungodly number of drives that had quite a few surprises in it.

Yes, we all read that one.

> 2-3 partitions sounds very reasonable.  Having to use ln is a pretty big
> sacrifice IMO.

_Obviously_, it's a get-by measure.  Covered separately, as seemingly 
that wasn't apparent.

>  At least with a single partition the filesystem tries it's best to keep files
> in the same dir a short seek distance away.  Karsten had the same problem.
> Not that the normal average case doesn't justify 2-3 partitions, but I think
> it's rather exceptional to justify 7-8.

If you think "minimising seek" was cited as a reason for 7-8
filesystems, then you need to re-read what was posted, as that was not
the case.