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

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Sep 1, 2016 at 2:04 AM, gevisz <gevisz@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> Is it still advisable to partition a big hard drive
> into smaller logical ones and why?
>

Assuming this is only used on Linux machines (you mentioned moving
files around), here is what I would do:

1. Definitely create a partition table.  Yes, I know some like to
stick filesystems on raw drives, but you're basically going to fight
all the automation in existence if you do this.
2. Set it up as an LVM partition.  Unless you're using filesystems
like zfs/btrfs that have their own way of doing volume management,
this just makes things less painful down the road.
3. I'd probably just set it up as one big logical volume, unless you
know you don't need all the space and you think you might use it for
something else later.  You can change your mind on this with ext4+lvm
either way, but better to start out whichever way seems best.

It will take you all of 30 seconds to format this, unless you're
running badblocks (which almost nobody does, because...).

You seem to be concerned about losing data.  You should be.  This is a
physical storage device.  You WILL lose everything stored on it at
some point in time.  You mitigate this by one or more of:
1.  Not storing anything you mind losing on the drive, and then not
complaining when you lose it.
2.  Keeping backups, preferably at a different physical location,
using a periodically tested recovery methodology.
3.  Availability solutions like RAID (not the same as a backup, but it
will mean less downtime WHEN you WILL have a drive failure).  Some
filesystems like zfs/btrfs have specific ways of achieving this (and
are generally more resistant to unreliable storage devices, which all
storage devices are).

I've actually had LVM eat my data once due to some kind of really rare
bug (found one discussion of similar issues on some forum somewhere).
That isn't a good reason not to use LVM.  Wanting to plug the drive
into a bunch of Windows machines would be a good reason not to use
LVM, or ext4 for that matter.

Most of the historic reasons for not having large volumes had to do
with addressing limits, whether it be drive geometry limits,
filesystem limits, etc.  Modern partition tables like GPT and
filesystems can handle volumes MUCH larger than 5TB.

Most modern journaling filesystems should also tend to avoid failure
modes like losing the entire filesystem during a power failure (when
correctly used, heaven help you if you follow a random friend's advice
with mount options, like not using at least ordered data or disabling
barriers).  But, bugs can exist, which is a big reason to have backups
and not just trust your filesystem unless you don't care much about
the data.

-- 
Rich