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

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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.

> > 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.

> 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 sceme, 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.

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