HDD partitioning question...

[Dharma Wolford]

Hi folks,

(I'm a relative newcomer to all this... thanks for your patience & help.)

I've installed FreeBSD 6.2 on a system that will be primarily used as an FTP
server.  It has 2 drives - one for the OS and the other for the FTP
storage.  My question is about the storage drive in this case.

You can see how I have things partitioned right now:
#################################
[root at mybox /var/log]# mount
/dev/da0s1a on / (ufs, local)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
/dev/da0s1d on /tmp (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/da0s1f on /usr (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/da0s1e on /var (ufs, local, soft-updates)
/dev/da1 on /usr/home (ufs, local, soft-updates)
[root at mybox /var/log]#
#################################

I started by trying to use fdisk to partition the storage drive (/dev/da1)
but was getting errors which I don't exactly recall - something about a
problem with the 'block device'.
Anyway, then I wound up using the command "newfs -O 2 /dev/da1"  which
seemed to work and I was then able to mount and use the drive.

My question is:  is there anything wrong with having "/dev/da1"  mounted an
in-use?  Should I have created a partition like "/dev/da1s1a" or something?
I seem to remember somebody once chiding me for having formatted or mounted
the 'block device' itself instead of a partition... is this making any sense
to anyone?  Clearly I need to know more about *NIX file systems (slices,
partitions, block devices) and best practices or some such - I am working on
it but obviously have a ways to go!

Thanks very much!

dharma