Re: / /home on different partitions?

larry wrote:
SUSE likes to put root and home on different partitions. Some distros
like to separate /boot also. If you have only one hard drive, what is
the advantage/disadvange of this vs. all on one partition?

thanks

One partition is all eggs in one basket.

Having a separate / and separate /boot aids in flexibility
and voids some issues on older hardware. /boot doesn't usually
need the overhead of journaling (for example), so ext2 can
be used to maximize the space for a filesystem that should
be pretty small (<100M).

I prefer using a small / as well and having it non-LVM.
The reason, because ideally / shouldn't be used for everything,
however it is useful for troubleshooting and obviously for
booting.

Having separate partitions and using LVM gains you:

Flexibility
Isolation and security
Dynamic growth
Offline shrinking

Now... with that said, most aren't very disciplined with
regard to storage and having all eggs in one basket
does increase the overall storage capacity of the
platform.

But, if isolation and security are important as well
as flexibility, then using separate partitions makes
very good sense. And if you have a multiple drive
scenario and want increased performance (and you don't
use any kind of meaningful RAID), then using separate
partitions and drives can make things much faster.

For example, consider the following partition scheme
across two drives:

/boot drive1
/ drive2
/usr drive1
/usr/lib drive2
/home drive1
/usr/share drive2
/tmp drive2
/var drive2

Thus an application that fills up /tmp isn't going
to cause applications that don't use /tmp to crash
because disk space is out... etc.... etc...

You also get faster load times with /usr/bin on
a different drive from /usr/lib.

The areas that tend to need growth are /usr (mostly bin),
/usr/lib, /usr/share, /var and /tmp. By having these
isolated, the areas that need to grown can be grown.
Likewise, if an area is deemed to be too big, you
can boot into rescue mode and shrink logical volumes
that were too large.

But, everybody has different needs and obviously with
flexibility comes some storage waste. So it all
depends on what matters most to you.

It gets even more complicated if you want to throw
RAID into the mix... or for some, it may make life
simpler. HW RAID vs SW RAID can change how things
are done dramatically as well.


.

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