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

[gevisz]

2016-09-01 10:23 GMT+03:00 Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@×××.de>:
> On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 08:13:23AM +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
>
>> it will take about 5 seconds to partition it.
>> And a few more to mkfs it.
>>
>> Are you sure you aren't thinking of mkfs with ext2 (which did take hours
>> for a drive that size?
>
> Some people do a full systems check (i.e. badblocks) before entrusting a
> drive with anything important.

It is a good advice! I have already thought of this but I am sorry to
acknowledge
that, since the "old good times" of MS DOS 6.22, I never did this in Linux. :(

And except for one 2.5" disk failure on my old laptop about 7 years ago,
I had no problem with this so far. :)

All other my hard disks work for about 10 years without any intervention
from my side and even without any backups so far. That's why I started
to think about it now. :)

So, can you, please, advice me about the program or utility that can do
badblocks check for me?

>> > Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive
>> > into smaller logical ones and why?
>>
>> The only reason to partition a drive is to get 2 or more
>> smaller ones that differ somehow (size, inode ratio, mount options, etc)
>
> If you want to do backups, then of course the file system is important, so
> it retains permissions and stuff. Your ext4 choice is the right one in that
> case. However, I partitioned by backupdrive into two partitions, so the one
> with the sensitive data can be encrypted. The big partition that holds media
> files has not got that treatment.

It is, again, a good advice but, again, 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.

>> Go with no partition table by all means, but if you one day find you
>> need one, you will have to copy all your data off, repartition, and copy
>> your data back.
>
> When I do the mentioned partitioning scheme, I put the biggest partition at
> the beginning of the drive and the smaller one(s) at the back. That way,
> should I ever actually need to resize a partition, I only have to export the
> smaller partition for the process (or none at all, if it’s just a backup
> itself and I have another backup on another drive).
> Of course there’s LVM these days, but up until recently, I used NTFS for the
> media partition so I could also read it in $DUMB_OS, which doesn’t know LVM.
> Only a short while back, I also switched to ext4 for that, so I can retain
> file names with : and ? in them. But I still refrained from using LVM,
> though.

I am afraid of LVM because of the same reason I described above.

> Gruß | Greetings | Qapla’
> ’ve been using vi for 15 years, because I don’t know with which command
> to close it.

:)