[plug] linking to different drives

[Nick Bannon]

On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 02:24:53PM +0800, Matt Kemner wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Kenworthy Family wrote:
> 
> > As an aside, it was a 17gig disk and I know the figures are rubbery and linux
> > also reserves a buffer out of the size, but 500meg out of 4.3 gigs and
[...]
> It is reserved for root - so when the drive gets close to running out,
> users can no longer write to the drive, but root can still log in and fix
> the problem.
> You can change the amount allocated with tune2fs
[...]

That's definitely the most important one.

I've also been playing with some large partitions recently, though, and
there's a couple of other things you can fiddle with. Using fewer inodes
and sparse superblocks (these both have their drawbacks) I freed up a
(little) bit of extra space.

However, the big benefit was time - large ext2fs partitions take a long
time to mount and fsck. I heard tell that a large block size might help
and it definitely did. Going from the default 1024 byte block size to
4096 bytes cut my mount time from 24 seconds to 2.4 seconds, and my fsck
time from 102 seconds to 28 seconds!

mkfs.ext2 -s 1 -i 8192 -m 2 -b 4096 /dev/sda3
			    ^^^^^^^

The drawback is that if you have lots of small files or directories,
more space is wasted on the filesystem. I'm using that partition as spool
space for half a dozen huge dump files before they get put onto tape,
so it's insignificant.

Nick.

-- 
  Nick Bannon  | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick at it.net.au | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal