Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive?

[Michael Mol]

On Thursday, September 01, 2016 12:09:09 PM gevisz wrote:
> 2016-09-01 11:54 GMT+03:00 Neil Bothwick <neil@××××××××××.uk>:
> > On Thu, 1 Sep 2016 11:49:43 +0300, gevisz wrote:
> >> > If your filesystem becomes corrupt (and you are unable to
> >> > repair it), *all* of your data is lost (instead of just
> >> > one partition). That's the only disadvantage I can think
> >> > of.
> >>
> >> That is exactly what I am afraid of!
> >>
> >> So, the 20-years old rule of thumb is still valid. :(
> >>
> >> > I don't like partitions either (after some years, I
> >> > always found that sizes don't match my requirements any
> >> > more),
> >>
> >> And this is exactly the reason why I do not want to partition
> >> my new hard drive! :)
> >
> > Have you considered LVM? You get the benefits of separate filesystems
> > without the limitations of inflexible partitioning.
>
> I am afraid of LVM because of the same reason as described below:
>
> returning to the "old good times" of MS DOS 6.22, I do remember that working
> then on 40MB (yes, megabytes) hard drive I used some program that
> compressed all the data before saving them on that hard drive.
> Unfortunately, one day, because of the corruption, I lost all the data on
> that hard drive. Since then, I am very much afraid of compressed or
> encrypted hard drives.

LVM doesn't *need* to do any of that. It will only do as much as you tell it 
to do. If you only want to use it as a way of reshaping relatively simple 
partitions, you can use it for that.

Honestly, I tend not to create separate partitions for separate mount points 
these days. At least, not on personal systems. For servers, it's can be 
beneficial to have /var separate from /, or /var/log separate from /var, or 
/var/spool, or /var/lib/mysql, or what have you. But the biggest driver for 
that, IME, is if one of those fills up, it can't take down the rest of the 
host.

In your case, I'd suggest using a single / filesystem. If it works, it works. 
If it doesn't, you'll know in the future where you need to be more flexible; 
there's no single panacea.

-- 
:wq