Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box?

On 20/05/12 14:57, Steve wrote:
I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having Kubuntu
12.04 installed on the hard drive.

Shopping around, it seems like 1 TB hard drives are the norm.

I would also like to install a virtual machine on this new PC to run
Windows for the occasional use where I just can't get something on
Linux ( for example, streaming Netflix ). I would also like to be
able to experiment with the occasional "new" linux distro, without
jeopardizing my main Kubuntu install or VM set up.

I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
much on a TB hard drive? ).

Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?

A friend at work suggested multiple hard drives, he said they could be
set up so that I wouldn't have to dual boot. Is there any values in
this?

Thanks much in advance for any tips

Steve

If you want to improve the speed, get 2 hard drives and set them up with Linux raid. Divide each disk into three - 1GB for boots, 1/2 ram size for swap, and the rest. Make a raid1 pair out of the two 1GB partitions and use it for /boot. Use the two swap partitions (with equal priorities), and put the rest as a raid10,far2 layout. You probably want that to be a partitionable raid array, so that you can make one partition for /, and another for /home (or if you prefer, make it into an LVM physical volume - that's what I usually do).

Don't try to get the PC builder to do this - do it yourself. It is so easy these days (assuming you have another PC with internet access to "how-tos" during the process) that anyone can do it - except system builders.

Don't bother leaving space for "other distros". Just make sure your machine has plenty of ram, and you can run other distros from live CDs.


.

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