pros and cons of separate filesystems

[Paul Howarth]

Keith Hunt wrote:
> I'm looking for a little advice on setting up FC5 on a brand new machine. I
> am pretty sure some of you folks don't mind giving advice...
> 
> I have always configured *nix systems with the standard (well, OK, sort of
> standard) set of separate filesystems, trying to predict how much space I
> will need for each. It usually works out OK albeit with some wasted space
> here and there. Once in a while I have had to repartition things and 
> that is
> obviously a pain.
> 
> Are there any compelling reasons to do that anymore or should I just make
> one big partition? I am talking about a couple pretty big SATA drives in
> probably a RAID 1 configuration.

I habitually use separate partitions for / /boot /home /usr /var /tmp 
and sometimes /usr/local. I will start adding /srv next time I do a 
clean install.

The big advantage of the single filesystems is that the space is always 
available where you need it.

For me, the major advantages of the separate filesystems are:

1. The root filesystem hardly grows at all, so no matter what happens 
elsewhere, the root filesystem never fills up, and the nasty problems 
that come with that are avoided.

2. If you use LVM, it's much easier to add additional space to non-root 
filesystems than it is for the root filesystem. You can just unmount 
them, or in the worst case, reboot single user and the resize them 
whilst they're offline. With a single filesystem, if you want to resize 
it (e.g. to shrink it to try out another OS on the same disk, or to grow 
it into free space or another disk), you'll need to use the rescue CD if 
ext2online can't help (and that's quite often the case).

Paul.