[Techtalk] /usr Partition

[Raquel Rice]

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 22:02:05 -0800
Val Henson <val.henson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 1/18/06, Kristine Thompson <kristineth at ameritech.net> wrote:
> > How big should I set aside for /usr partition? Linux default is
> > 6 Gig, and I want it bigger then 6 Gig?
> 
> This is how I have my 80GB disk partitioned:
> 
> val at goober:/usr/src$ df -hl | grep -v tmpfs
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> /dev/sda1              19G  4.1G   14G  24% /
> /dev/sda6              37G  635M   35G   2% /home
> 
> Yep, I left 20GB (decimal, not binary) unpartitioned for future
> use.  I'm doing some file system development, so I do that a lot.
> 
> On modern systems, it really only makes sense to have one
> partition for "/" and one for "/home" - and sometimes "/boot". 
> The reason to have "/home" separate is that if you have to
> reinstall, you can blow away "/" but leave all your personal files
> intact on "/home".  The reason to have "/boot" separate is to make
> it easier on the bootloader in some cases - generally not a worry
> these days.  The division between "/" and "/home" depends on how
> you're going to use it; generally you should leave at least 10GB
> for "/". (My / is probably so full because I've got lots of kernel
> trees on it... time to move them to /home I think.)
> 
> In the old days, UNIX systems used to have a bunch of different
> partitions, mainly because disks were (a) small, (b) slow.  Also
> file systems were really delicate and it was nice to only have
> your /var screwed up.  Unfortunately, a lot of people are still
> partitioning up their modern 60GB super fast drives running ext3
> like it was 1972, and all it does is make for headaches when one
> partition or another fills up.
> 
> -VAL

I recently installed a "new" system with a fast 80GB drive.  I used
500MB for / and 150MB for /boot.  The rest of the drive I set up an
LVM and created partitions using Reiserfs, so I can resize
partitions as the need arises, or add new drives with less hassle.

-- 
Raquel
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