Partition sizes for small harddisk

[Alex de Kruijff]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 10:56:00AM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > On Sun, Jun 20, 2004 at 03:41:53PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > > With that little disk space, I would be inclined to make it all
> > > just one root (/) partition - with a bit of swap.   You might not
> > > even be able to have a swap as big as memory with no more disk than 
> > > that, but try for a swap of memory size or at least 100 MB or so
> > > and the rest in /. 
> > > 
> > > I think FreeBSD has grown since they made those claims of 250 MB
> > > being enough for a minimum.   You might be able to cram it in, 
> > > but would have little room for doing anything.   
> > 
> > That is realy a bad idee.
> > 
> > / is supposted to be small to limit the change that something
> > irriversible happens to it during a crash
> > /tmp can be mounted so that it gets a real power boost
> > 
> > There are many other reason why not to do this. I can't think of them
> > this quickly.
> 
> We ain't talking a commercial grade server operation here.
> With this small a disk, the more space you dead-end by consigning
> it to a file system that isn't getting used the more you limit
> what you can do -- in this case.   

Still the size of root is constand over time. Haveing two partitions (/
and /disk/) whould be better. You then can ln -s /tmp /usr /... to share
these.

Personaly I would juist try it out one or two times before installing it
diffently. Then then do it with sepperated partitions.

> I would not do this if I had
> lots of disk, but...
> 
> Actually, some of the heavy hitters out there say they have been
> leaning toward all / disk partitioning + swap, of course.

That doesn't make it a good idee. I woudn't jump in to the watter even
if everybody else did.

-- 
Alex

Articles based on solutions that I use:
http://www.kruijff.org/alex/FreeBSD/