Separate Home Partition?

[imported_LoKe]

I ordered a new rig and I bought a 160GB SATA hard drive along with it. What I'm wondering is, should I put my /home directory on a separate partition? Why or why not? What benefits does it yield? If so, do I partition off the space before installing my operating system (Ubuntu), or can I/should I do it afterwards? How much space should one generally allocate?

Also, I've currently got 2x20GB Hard Drives and a 30GB hard drive. I was going to use the new, largest one (160GB) for my media and other downloads, but now I'm wondering if I should dedicate a large partition for the base operating system, the home directory, and then the rest for regular storage.

What would you advise?

 

[xtknight]

Yeah, it's much easier to mess around with your system when you have your home directory separate. Since my home directory (/home, xfs) is where all my data resides, I allocated 180G for it. The system (/, ext3) is given 44G. I also have another 103G file system (/data, ext3) that I can use to share data between Windows (w/ explore2fs) and Linux. I also use it for media storage and my 32-bit chroot jail.

I'm loving my setup right now and I'd definitely do it the same way again in the future. ext3 seems to handle large numbers of files the best (the Linux system consists of TONS of small files) and xfs handles big files (documents, downloads, and media) well and doesn't fragment much. I'm basing that off my own experiences. VMware on reiserfs wasn't very feasible as it would get fragmented a ton for me. With xfs I have no problem.

When I upgrade to Edgy, I am going to create a new home partition (to wipe out all the junk like GNOME cache), but since I have it separate that means I can nuke my Dapper / partition in its entirety without worrying about a single document being lost. It's great having that peace of mind.

P.S.

The first time, I moved my home partition after installation. Subsequent times I specified at setup where I wished /home to be mounted.

Use the 30GB as an ext3 / partition. This is my suggestion:

30G, /, ext3
160G, /home, xfs
20G, /data1, xfs
20G, /data2, xfs

Maybe data1 and data2 can be combined into a single mount somehow. Or all three HDs could go into a /home mount perhaps.

 

[imported_LoKe]

I could imagine I would suffer some kind of performance hit if I tried to combine them, but I can't be sure. I know little to nothing about that kind of thing, nor have I ever used a RAID array. However, your suggestion looks great!

Can you choose where to install the home directory during the OS installation? I don't recall being able to make that choice, but perhaps it was because I wasn't looking. But yeah, that looks like a good setup, and exactly what I wanted.

Thanks for the information. 😉

EDIT: Crap, didn't really think this through. The system I ordered supports SATA, but my current 3 hard drives are all IDE. I suppose I should grab a converter.

 

[drag]

Usually you can choose which partition or logical volume or whatever you want to be mounted as /home or other mount points at the install time.

Otherwise you can always edit your /etc/fstab to do whatever you want.

 

[n0cmonkey]

I typically use:
/
/home
/usr
/usr/local
/var
/tmp

 

[nweaver]

one of the (many) benifits of Linux/*nix is the way the filesystems and file tree work together. Much easier then if you try and replace, say, documents and settings folder in windows. I have added drives to servers, copied data, and mounted the drive in the new location, no downtime, no lost data.

 

[imported_LoKe]

Since I have to get a IDE -> SATA adapter before I can do what xt suggested, I'll first need to partition my 160GB drive to suit my needs until then. So what do you think about this:

20GB, /, ext3
140GB, /home, xfs

I think 20GB is enough for /, especially until I get the adapter.

 

[sourceninja]

I run a 36gig drive for / and a 300 gig drive for /home.

 

[imported_LoKe]

This sounds pretty simple to me, but could I just throw these 3 IDE hard drives into another box (like a PIII) and network them together, and mount those 3 hard drives onto this box? Could I get it to detect the network before installing my OS, so I could install it on one of the IDE discs? That part sounds pretty unlikely.

 

[sourceninja]

I've done linux installs over network before. It's not very hard, but it will probably be easier to install onto one drive, then edit your fstab and copy the files over to the network drives.

 

[Nothinman]

Could I get it to detect the network before installing my OS, so I could install it on one of the IDE discs? That part sounds pretty unlikely.

You want an nfsroot system? Your best bet would be to setup the new root on the older system seperate, with Debian/Ubuntu this is simple thanks to debootstrap. You can tell debootstrap to setup a Debian system in any directory, then export the directory via NFS and get the other system to mount it as root. How you do the last part isn't entirely clear to me though since I've never done it and it depends on how you want to boot the machine.