How should I partition 2 80 gig drives?

Gary W. Swearingen garys at opusnet.com
Sun Sep 4 15:03:08 PDT 2005


bob self <bobself at charter.net> writes:

> I want to set up FreeBSD 5.4 Release to fully use 2 80 gig hard drives. I'm not sure how I
> should set these up in disklabel editor. I just want to use this as a general purpose machine.

I've been happy giving my two 80 GB disks 4 equal-sized primary
partitions so it's easy to back one up, esp. before doing an upgrade,
etc.  Or use one or more for extra storage, etc.  Maximizes
flexibility and I seldom fill one anyway.

I only regret that I let the first pri.part. be oddly sized because it
can't have the first track.  I told myself I'd use those for Linux or
data.  I've always tried to partition on cylinder boundaries, but the
partitioner didn't obey for the first pri.part.  I plan to try
partitioning my next disk on track boundaries, with all four the same
size.

As for FreeBSD divisions, I have something like:

subpart  Cyls    Approx MB    Use
a        16      125          /
b        70      549          swap
e        70      549          /var
f        1138    8926         /usr
g        1138    8926         /home

/:
I'm using 71 MB on / with by far the biggest user being three
versions of /boot/kernel/, so 125 seems about right.

swap: Swap should be big enough to hold all the programs you plan to
run at the same time, minus your RAM size.  Except, if you plan to
make OS "crash dumps", swap should be at least as big as your RAM and
another MB might be safer.  500 MB - RAM seems a good minimum these
days, except the installer probably requires >0.  (I seldom use any
swap with 512 MB RAM, but xosview can show a broken program filling it
up, so it's good to have more than the minimum.)

/usr, /home:
Use your own judgement on the size ratio. I'm using 3 GB in /usr
and I've got a lot of stuff not needed for ports and system
re-building.

/tmp:
Maybe have the following in /etc/fstab so /tmp files are kept in RAM.
(Use /var/tmp for files you don't want to go away when OS halts.)
md	/tmp		mfs	rw,-s128m	0	0


With a similar setup, I've tried mounting "/" read-only and observed
no problems.


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