[NTLUG:Discuss] Adding new hard drive

[kbrannen@gte.net]

Brian wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 08, 2002 at 03:52:41PM -0500, MontyS at videopost.com wrote:
> 
>>Regarding partitioning:
>>
>>I have spoken with a number of people in the past, and have yet to find any
>>compelling reason for having multiple partitions on a system. 
> 
> 
> Here's a test:  Start a process that writes to a file in /tmp.  Go ahead, let it
> fill up.  Then tell me how well your system is running after "df" shows 0 bytes of
> diskspace available.
> 
> Partitioning keeps users from monopolizing a system, whether accidentally (like a
> process gone wild in the example above) or intentionally.  Partitions allow for
> hot-swapping faulty drives without having to bring the system down.
> Properly-designed partitions help developing convenient backup schedules.
> Partitions can improve performance through parallelized reads and writes.   

Partitions are also a good way to protect your system.  Since /boot is usually 
it's own partition, once my machine is set up and not going to be changing, I 
change /etc/fstab to mount /boot read-only.

In theory, you should be able to mount / read-only, the exceptions being /tmp 
and /var, and probably /usr/local, which is why many systems will sym-link 
/usr/tmp to either /tmp or /var/tmp.  Only partitions allow you to do that 
(logical volumes might be able to also, but I don't know enough about them to 
say for sure).  Therefore, by making /var and /tmp their own partitions, they 
and everything else that changes are mounted, so / can become read-only (at 
least in theory, if the system is set up correctly and is following all the 
standards. :-)

Partitions were a good way to economically use left over space on HD's when 
they were smaller, but that's probably the least important reason to use them.

HTH,
Kevin