Required: Partition and File System Advice

QuantumXP · 12 Mar 2006 at 14:35

I'm planning to take a big step and dual boot with Gentoo on my main machine. I have a 120GB drive to use plus space on a few others if needed. It will be used as a typical desktop machine for a single user. What I require is some advice/recommendations on partitions and filesystems to use.

Previous installations have lead me to create 4 main partitions, /boot (ext2), swap, / (ext3) and /home (ext3). The others being ext3 used as a recieved files partion or a data store. Being in a home environment there is the rare chance of a powercut. My understanding is that some of the newer file systems can get corrupted by such events which is not a good thing to happen.

So I wish to achieve a balance of performance and reliability for my system. What would be a good way for me to achieve this? Should I consider splitting off any other directories to different paritions?

cb_linus · 12 Mar 2006 at 15:00

4 partitions should be enough really. A seperate /home is always a good idea in case you ever find you have to reinstall your os or want to try a different os instead - allows for you to keep your personal files untouched. Having /boot seperate is good too - one reason being that it should get unmounted one the os is booted, reducing the risk of your grub.conf or linux kernel or whatever being accidently deleted, over-written or whatever.

For a home desktop I can't say I've really noticed much difference between ext3 and reiserfs - reiserfs is supposed to be a lot faster with small files but then I always had problems with very long loading times for Neverwinter Nights on reiserfs (easily fixable by moving a single file to ext2/3 if you do choose reiserfs for youe root partition).

Theoretically, you could have a whole load of partitions but you may run into problems if one or more partitions fills its allocated space while others may barely fill up at all. Just make sure you choose plenty of space for your root partition so you don't run into problems in the future

Dunky · 12 Mar 2006 at 15:57

I run with / and /boot as ext3 and /home as reiserFS. Startup time is a tiny bit slower because of it (the journal replay can take a few secs even if there's no transactions to be replayed). Reiser4 is meant to be a good chunk faster in areas and slower in others - also still not considered production stable. There are a few file system benchmarks out there, most seem to suggest that for smaller files, ReiserFS has the slight advantage. XFS or JFS are best for large files and ext3 is the best all-rounder.

It's a bit like the difference between most current SATA drives, the speed difference is minimal and I doubt you'd see a huge difference unless you were using a large application with lots of diskwork (Vid / Audio or DB style apps).

QuantumXP · 12 Mar 2006 at 19:19

Thanks for your advice. I was doing some extra reading and discovered the following post on the Gentoo forums. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-305871-highlight-ext3+reiserfs.html

It describes a way of enhancing the performance of ext3. This being the case I am more inclined to use ext3 over Reiserfs. Reiserfs seems to still lack the praise given to the tried and tested ext3.

I think I will end up using ext2/3 throughout the system with the 4 main partitions I described before

riven · 12 Mar 2006 at 22:50

I have a partition for /usr/portage, it should make emerging a bit faster as the files are less spread over the HD. Don't forget to make it big enough to download source files to though!

On this system I mostly user reiser3. I'm not sure reiser3 makes that much difference compaired to ext3, however the initial loading of the filesystem at mount is noticibly slower for reiser, especially on large drives. I have heard many people online rave about xfs, so that might be worth a look. Its best advised on a stable system though, as it transfers some stuff in memory, and i think crashes can cause data loss, which is the main reason I don't use it.

I've just done another gentoo install on a laptop and went ext3 on all but boot because it loads fast and is reliable.

QuantumXP · 13 Mar 2006 at 01:15

XFS does have benefits but from what I read its best suited for machines with a UPS as power loss = data loss. I'm going to stick with ext3 (ext2 on /boot) with a few of the performance tweaks. I'd rather sacrifice a little performance for data integrity.

How big would you say a /usr/portage partition should be?

riven · 13 Mar 2006 at 09:30

Probably 4 or 5 gig. My partition is using about 2.5 gigs of space at the moment, with the whole portage tree, and a lot of packages in the distfiles folder.