Required: Partition and File System Advice

[QuantumXP]

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?

 

[QuantumXP]

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

 

[QuantumXP]

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?