[plug] Disk Partitioning & Dial on Demand questions

[Christian Payne]

Bret Busby wrote:
> 
> Chris Griffin wrote:
> >
> > I have a system at home that I am setting up for a friend that posses some
> > interesting questions, well for me anyway, and would appreciate some
> > help/advice.
> >
> > The system has two drives in it. The first is a 4GB of which I can have
> > 1Gig for the system, the rest is for user data area. With all of the system
> > and facilities I had to install, it left me with that partition 93% full.
> > For this reason I fitted an old 240MB drive as a secondary and would like
> > to add this into the system. This raises two questions for me.
> > First, should I just move /var onto this drive or should I move other areas
> > onto it as well.
> > Secondly, how do I move it over without having to reinstall the system?
> >

> However, I believe that it has been mentioned on the list, in the past, that it
> could be a good idea, to have the swap partition on a separate physical drive,
> as this could cause parallel disk access, which would increase performance,
> provided the physical drive on which the swap partition resides, is not too much
> slower than the primary hard disk. The 240MB HDD, because of its size, and
> therefore its age, may not increase performance, and may instead reduce
> performance, but, having the swap partition on that drive could be useful, apart
> from performance.

This isn't a bad idea -- assuming you would ever need 240MB of swap
which I suspect would be unlikely unless you have A LOT of physical RAM
(>=256MB IMO).  Otherwise you could possibly stick /var on it or even
the root filesystem (the disadvantage here being that if it's an old
disk and it fails, things are messy).

> Depending on what applications are to be run on Linux, it is my understanding
> that 2GB is really needed for Linux and its utilities, applications, etc, apart
> from the data.

Definitely not!  My workstation here running Debian contains A LOT of
packages (pretty much all that I'll ever possibly need and a few more)
and it's only just over 1GB.  My suggestion is to go through and take
out all the packages you don't need and you'll save a heap of disk
space... also, I don't know what sort of user data you're planning on
storing but I suspect you won't need 3 GB for user data... (a common
exception to this being if you have lots of MP3s etc.)

Regards,

Christian.