Linux best practices disk partitioning

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mike acker Level 7
Posts: 1517 Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2013 6:29 pm Location: Kalamazoo, MI

Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by mike acker » Thu Feb 11, 2016 6:48 pm

any suggestions for a Best Practice for Disk Partitions?

should there be 1 Primary partition with 3 extended partitions?
1 — /
2 — /home
and
3 — /swap

evidently about 30 GB is enough for 1 and 3;
2 could be whatever — let’s say we split up a 1TB drive — make /home = 400 GB,—

this would leave space for a second primary partition — which could be 500 GB for a Windows install

there seem to be as many views on this as there are essays so I was hoping we have a recomendation for a Best Practice to get started on

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Fred Barclay Level 12
Posts: 4185 Joined: Sat Sep 13, 2014 11:12 am Location: USA primarily

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Fred Barclay » Thu Feb 11, 2016 7:38 pm

That looks pretty good to me.

My setup:
24 GB /
84 GB /home
5 GB swap

/ and swap add up to 29 GB; just 1 GB short of your value.

I use GPT so extended/logical partitions are not a worry for me, but considering your scenario, keeping Mint inside an extended partition makes sense. That is—your disk used the MBR scheme, right?

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austin.texas Level 20
Posts: 12003 Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2009 3:57 pm Location: at /home

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by austin.texas » Thu Feb 11, 2016 8:19 pm

mike acker wrote: any suggestions for a Best Practice for Disk Partitions?

should there be 1 Primary partition with 3 extended partitions?

First, you can only have 1 extended partition (containing multiple logical partitions). There is no such thing as «3 extended partitions».
Next, «Best Practice» would be NO extended or logical partitions. I don’t have any extended partitions, and never have had.
An extended partition is a work-around construct which is more fragile than a primary partition. If any of your logical partitions are corrupted, you lose all of them. That is not true of primary partitions.

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Pierre Level 21
Posts: 12958 Joined: Fri Sep 05, 2008 5:33 am Location: Perth, AU.

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Pierre » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:18 am

under win-xp — you could do the whole lot with just primary partitions,
but with win-7 — that sometimes wants a boot partition as well,
and that now needs Five partitions — unless you don’t use a separate /home — that is.

the actual size(s) does really depend on the size of your HDD.
but — above mentioned size is quite reasonable.

my HDDs traditionally are quite small, and so are usually sized at about half of those mentioned.

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BigEasy Level 6
Posts: 1281 Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 9:17 am Location: Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by BigEasy » Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:32 am

Best practice? It is very personal. I always have just one partition. See no reason for me to have seperately /, home, swap.

Pjotr Level 23
Posts: 19040 Joined: Mon Mar 07, 2011 10:18 am Location: The Netherlands (Holland) 🇳🇱 Contact:

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Pjotr » Fri Feb 12, 2016 5:40 am

Opinions differ and will continue to differ. I hereby predict that no consensus will be reached on a «best practice».

My take: just two partitions. One for root and one for swap. Root preferably on a primary partition; only on a logical one when unavoidable.

1. I consider a separate /home to be an unnecessary complication, because you need *external* backups of your documents anyway. Granted, it makes re-installing a bit easier, but how often do you have to re-install?
Furthermore, a separate /home causes less than optimal disk space allocation, which is especially annoying on small drives.

2. In my opinion a separate swap partition is needed because a. I think it’s useful when my system can swap under extreme duress and b. I don’t want the junk in the swap polluting my root partition (so I don’t want the swap to be a file on my root partition, like in Windows).

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BigEasy Level 6
Posts: 1281 Joined: Mon Nov 24, 2014 9:17 am Location: Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by BigEasy » Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:09 am

Moem Level 22
Posts: 15620 Joined: Tue Nov 17, 2015 9:14 am Location: The Netherlands Contact:

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by Moem » Fri Feb 12, 2016 6:31 am

If your issue is solved, kindly indicate that by editing the first post in the topic, and adding [SOLVED] to the title. Thanks!

mike acker Level 7
Posts: 1517 Joined: Wed Jul 31, 2013 6:29 pm Location: Kalamazoo, MI

Re: Disk Partitions — Best Practice ?

Post by mike acker » Fri Feb 12, 2016 7:42 am

thanks for all the notes and input guys!

failing a «Best Practice» perhaps a Beginners’ Recommendation could be possible ?

the reason I ask is: when my Win7 box died I replaced the Hard Drive with a 1TB WD and installed a fresh copy of LMDE(2),— hoping to run Epson Perfection V500 scanner and Canon DPP using WINE . Neither of these worked out . I replaced the LMDE(2) with a regular dist. of MINT 17.3 — and, using WINE plus the PlayonLinux WINE-front end — I got closer — but no Cigar . My guess the usual trouble — a non supported Window call.

My last effort then was to install a Win8.1 OEM — and of course this reformatted the disk as NTFS . the Win8.1 OEM failed as I couldn’t get the proper support for the monitor installed . I had started with an HP 1440×900 which my wife discarded — and which works perfect in Linux — but the Win8.1 OEM did not offer the 1440×900 resolution as an option . So,— I went and bought a nice Samsung 1920×1080 monitor — which is basically the standard monitor these days — and the Win8.1 OEM didn’t offer that resolution for that monitor either. A messed up match on resolution would be totally unacceptable for the Canon DPP application,—

probably I should not have bought the OEM dist. dunno but this whole Win mess feels a lot like throwing good money after bad.

so, I went back to re-install LMDE(2)

however: the LMDE(2) installer doesn’t partition the disk automatically like the std. dist. does and left me looking at the partition screen feeling pretty dumb ( and needing to learn how to partition a disk )

I’ve since re-loaded the main Dist. of MINT 17.3 — which is running great — but leaves me with a bad feeling about Windows apps,—

I now have one Windows system running — my wife’s Win7 — and — the MSFT/maintenace process could knock that one out — just as it did mine . which would leave one critical program,— that being Turbotax.

I’ll try Turbotax under WINE today. If that works I think I can live with work-arounds on the other two .

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Best Disk Partitioning Scheme for a Linux-based Developer Machine

Is there some kind of «best disk partitioning scheme» for a Linux-based web and application developer machine, in terms of performance, organization or others?

5 Answers 5

Partitioning doesn’t affect performance so much, but yes, file systems and their configuration affect performance. Look at this benchmark. For a little information about mounting options, see fstab at the ArchWili; especially look at atime options.

Partitioning has nothing with organization files in Linux, because in Linux everything is mounted into one tree.

I recommend one partition for the root filesystem, / , and separate partitions for folders where you place your work and personal data: /home and /var/www if you put your websites here, because if you change distro you will no need to do backup.

You may make partitions/disks based on files organization and their importance.

For example, you have got projects and documents which are very precious, then you can have them on RAID-ed disks. Also you may have remote disk mounted with ssh/ftp.

/ -> SSD disk, partition 1 /home -> SSD disk, partition 2 /tmp -> tmpfs /media/data -> RAID-ed disk, partition 2 (ie. shared photos with family) user mounts: /home/miroslav/secure -> RAID-ed disk, partition 1 (encrypted) /home/miroslav/remote -> sshfs/curlftpfs 

To mount remote and secure directories you will probably need some script that asks you for password(s).

Directory sym-links pwd=/home/miroslav :

projects -> secure/projects documents -> secure/documents mails-dir -> secure/mails 

On our internal developement virtual machines we use three partitions:

1. /root partition — housing mostly static operating system stuff
2. /var partition — for all dynamic data
3. /home partition — this is where development takes place with the user accounts of the developers

The reason to separate the partitions is to avoid a system halt due to full filesystem. If /home is full — does not matter. No running processes are affected. Delete something, enlarge online and continue.

/ should not change much (the only exception is /tmp — but files there are usually never big).

/var is the place where /var/tmp and all other «live» data resides (including /var/log ). A full /var/log is still the number one reason for system/application failures, so /var has to be big enough and there has to be a warning in time when space is becoming sparse there.

On physical machines, where disk space does not matter that much, we divide up additional «partitions» (mostly LVs), including: /var , /var/tmp , /var/log , /tmp , /boot , . but these are production machines, where uptime matters.

I used to make separate partitions for / , /home , /usr/local and /var , but I always seemed to end up with some sort of interactions across partitions. If I did install a different distro, I would want to have the unused dotfiles removed for simplicity, so I still made a backup and wiped /home .

As for making a /var partition, I made so many sites at school (~100 or so), with such a large variance in sizes between media heavy sites and text only exercises, that it was impossible for me to accurately estimate the amount of space to allocate.

Now, I just have one partition for everything, and I don’t come anywhere near filling it up. Personal media (movies, games, shows) go on an external HD, so that I can take it to a friend’s house. For virtual machines, which have to be virtual appliances in virtualbox if you want to move them, I like to have a dedicated flash drive for each one.

I’ve never seen a HD crash, but if it did, I don’t think it would matter how the physical drive was partitioned; it would just be dead. The riskiest thing I’ve ever done with my HD is resizing partitions, which is no longer necessary.

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