I need further HDD advice before submitting order.

[freebsd.org at donnacha.com]

Chuck and Jerry, thank you so much.

Chuck - I'm going to take your advice on setting up some kind of mirror, 
software RAID or whatever, thanks.

Jerry - that breakdown of how you would allocate space was amazing - 
seriously, a better division and a better explanation than anything I've 
found in the FreeBSD books.

The idea of allocating almost the entire 2nd drive to /spill is great, 
that will give me all the flexibility I need, brilliant!  Some

 > One more thing to think about is the possibility of creating a raid 
(mirror)
 > for critical things.  That would give you some security in case of a
 > disk crash.   In that case you would need to put your critical stuff
 > on the smaller drive and carve out an identical size piece on the large
 > one to be its mirror partner.   Check out vinum(8).  That, of necessity,
 > would make your allocation scheme look quite different.

Can I provide that space from within /spill i.e. without having to set 
up a seperate partition, or would I be better off just creating an 80GB 
partition for that on the 2nd drive, to be named and mounted as soon as 
I learn enough to implement RAID/mirroring/Vinum?

That would leave me with the following:

On the 80 GB drive
   /root    1 GB
   swap     2.5 GB
   /tmp     2 GB
   /usr     5 GB
   /var     5 GB
   /home    All the rest

On the 200 GB drive
   swap     2.5 GB
   /mirror  Same size as the actual size of the 1st disk, 65GB or whatever.
   /spill   All the rest

Does that make sense?

I guess that, as my usage grows, I'll be shifting things over with a 
mind to both disk use balance and space, do you reckon those factors 
will be fairly easy to work out?  From your suggestion that I can 
symlink stuff over to /spill with a reasonably fine granularity i.e. 
/var/spool and/or /var/db etc, I get the impression that it will be.

Do symlink cause any sort of performance hit?  Or rather, any meaningful 
performance hit?

Thanks,

Donnacha