Rich Freeman via plug on 11 Jul 2023 07:47:07 -0700


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


On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 9:35 AM Ron Mansolino via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
> 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?

I would HIGHLY recommend using LVM or a similar solution
(ZFS/btrfs/etc) for logical partitioning.

SSDs and HDDs should be separate volume groups or otherwise be set up
so that you can designate which partitions are on which, since mixing
them doesn't make sense.

Having some kind of RAID is of course always nice, but backups also
work (or the ability to otherwise re-create a system on-demand if it
doesn't actually contain persistent data).

If you have LVM/etc available then decisions around partitioning are
far less critical since they're easy to change.  Often /boot and EFI
partitions need to be seperate for bootloader reasons (usually without
LVM).

These days /usr and / are much more closely linked.  The right design
here might depend a bit on your distro.

I tend to avoid having a gazillion partitions because then
micromanaging space gets annoying.  Usually if I have / on SSD then
the main reason I'd put anything on a separate partition is so that I
can put it on HDD for capacity.  It may be easier to back up /home or
migrate if it is on its own partition.

If you aren't going to use LVM then honestly I'd probably just use one
partition for the entire OS, because the penalty for getting it wrong
is too high.  By all means mount HDD storage as needed for big things.

-- 
Rich
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