[plug] OT(?):Single Partition most secure - others wear out disks (beginner student question)

[Christian]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2001 at 09:42:15PM +0800, daniel at iinet.net.au wrote:
> Hi Plug,
> Single Partition most secure -others wear out disks according to my 
> lecturer and the text - I disagree & some support would be great(and 
> references to quote), or to be put right.
> 
> They say:
> "Single Partition, single-NOS.  A single-partition, single NOS 
> configuration is a drive that has a single primary partition that is 
> completely reserved for the NOS.  This is the most secure configuration" 
> ..... Text "MCSE - A Guide to Networking Essentials" c1998 by Ed Tittel & 
> David Johnson (current text for this year's new course) p 238.
 

I don't know about the wear and tear aspect but the way Linux handles
its filesystems, there isn't really much difference whether the
filesystem is on the same physical disk and different partition or two
separate disks.  To the user they look the same.  I suppose this is
different under DOS and NT where each separate disk and partition
creates a new drive letter in a fairly arbitrary fashion which leads to
a system that's hard to manage.  For example, if I'm running out of
space in my Linux system I can just get another hard disk, create a
filesystem on it and move part of my system onto that new filesystem.
Since I can mount the new partition anywhere in the filesystem, from a
user/application point of view nothing appears to have changed and the
system continues per usual.  Much more robust than the DOS approach.