i'm using different unices for 7 years and excluding few cases i never made other partitioning scheme than 2 partitions: swap and /

i have no problems like "there's out of space in partition x while plenty of y".
it's far easier to do backups too (single dump).

i read lots of howtos about this both in FreeBSD, NetBSD and (few years ago) in linux.

all states that multiple partition gives you:

1) better performance
2) better recovery in case of crash


in case of 2-nd argument - for me it's complete nonsense. in case of disk crash it doesn't make any difference, in case of filesystem crash no difference anyway.

UFS/FFS filesystem is anyway "partitioned" with "cylinder groups" and no destruction makes whole filesystem unreadable. statistically - with similar amount of destruction (writing nonsense because of hardware or software failure) same amount of data is unaccessible on given space, no matter if it's one or 20 filesystems.

it was indeed true for old BSD unix in PDP11 times that used "old filesystem" with all inodes on the beginning of partition. in case of bad write at the beginning of disk all content of one partition were lost. and i thing it's a myth copied years and years till today.


in case of 1-st argument - in theory it's true. in theory too - difference will be minimal unless you have your partitions very close to full and fragmentation starts to make big change on performance. but - that case - you would like to have one partition too to avoid problem with space!!

in linux (at least 2.0 and 2.2 kernels) it's worse because linux tends to optimize disk access on filesystem layer much better than on device driver layer. found experimentally that copying files on same partition is much faster than crossing different partition. in second case lot of disk head moves are done. but this is linux case...

in both FreeBSD and NetBSD it looks in my test that the difference is really difficult to measure.


fsck speed is same in checking one partition or many smaller. and it doesn't matter at all as FreeBSD (and NetBSD) doesn't crash every few hours like windows

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

Date: Sun, 12 Jun 2005 14:12:41 +0200 (CEST)
From: Wojciech Puchar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: ptitoliv <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Resizing /var

But there are some constraints :

- I have no free unpartitioned space available
- I can't format any partition because and I can't loose datas

Is there any solution with some BSD tools in order to solve this problem ?

link /var/spool to /usr/spool :)


Thank you for your answers

Best Regards,
Ptitoliv

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"

Reply via email to