Why partition disks?

[Bill Irwin]

In article <157 at locke.water.ca.gov> rfinch at caldwr.water.ca.gov (Ralph Finch) writes:
>
>1)  Does partitioning affect performance (capacity and speed)?
>
>2)  Does partitioning affect fragmentation?  Does one have to worry
>    about fragmentation with Unix, or SCSI, or ?

Everything  I have ever read about disk management tells me that  smaller
file systems on a disk are more efficient than large ones.  There are far
fewer inodes to check, for one thing.

I'm  not  sure  if you really mean partitions or file systems.   I  would
strongly  recommend your boot disk be split into at least 2 file systems.
One  for  /dev/root,  and  only put the O/S and things  that  can't  live
anywhere else there.  The rest of the disk could be a 2nd and/or 3rd file
system.   Have  the O/S on its own file system allows you to reload  your
O/S  without  having  to  reinstall all your  software,  or  cherry  pick
applications out of a tape archive taken prior to the reload.

You  do need to be concerned about fragmentation with Unix, but I believe
there  are fsck options that can reorganize a file system somewhat.   I'm
not totally familiar with though, so I won't hazzard a wrong suggestion.

You  get a tremendous feeling of wealth with lots of disk space...but  it
always seems to get used up again somehow.....

--
Bill Irwin
TWG The Westrheim Group
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