Re: [PLUG] how to divide up a filesystem?

[Steve Litt via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

Ron Mansolino via plug said on Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:35:59 -0400

>I have a pile of cheap parts I intend to assemble into a
>general-purpose workstation; I have 3 sata ports available.
>
>I want to put / on an SSD, and I'm looking for suggestions on
>how/where to mount the rest.

I mount my / on the SSD. I mount /home, /var, any other data
directories, /var, and the swap partition on spinning rust. This way
the SSD/NVMe houses only slowly changing data. People smarter than I
are still arguing both sides of whether rapidly changing data
prematurely wears an SSD, so I err on the side of safety.

A pro move is to bind mount home and var etc. So on your spinning rust,
you make directories /home, /var, etc, and then in /etc/fstab bind
mount them after regular mounting the root of the spinning rust drive.
Now you no longer need to worry about sizing partitions, because each
bind-mounted directory uses what it needs, without the need to
oversize every partition, or use layers of abstraction like lvm. 

>My instinct says to put /var on it's own port; and /usr is the largest
>subdir on my other machine.
>
>I thought about putting /home on the third spindle so I can yank it
>later if need be, can this be NTFS?

You can use just one spinning rust and yank the whole thing. I wouldn't
use NTFS on a Linux computer. EXT4 is tremendously reliable.

>What else should I put there? (eg. pub).
>
>how much swap space is overkill? 

The last time I heard a rule of thumb, it was to size your swap
partition at 3 times your RAM, so that would be 24GB given that you
have 8GB of RAM. Please keep in mind that swapping should be an
emergency, not a regular thing. Applications that use swap space slow
down by, in my subjective opinion, 10 to 100 times. I spoze it would be
less if the swap is on the SSD, but if the guys about SSDs wearing out
with large numbers of writes are correct, that's not good. If I catch an
application swapping, I close other programs, or if that doesn't work I
cease using the memory hog application.


SteveT

Steve Litt 
Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm
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