File systems, partitions, and raids - lessons learned
Here are a few basic rules I’ve learned about file systems, partitions, and raid devices:
- It is unusual to boot off of a raid device, and most systems will not do it
- Never use reiserfs - he murdered his wife!
- Don’t use ext3 for large filesystems with large files (for example, 500gb partition dedicated to a/v media)
- There are way more raid levels than necessary. Either go fast, redundant, or spend the $$ for both. That’s three.
- Don’t ever try to boot off of xfs with grub
- Don’t even try to use jfs, whose support has been dropped by many a distro now
- Installations happen faster if you are also watching dragonLance
- Always make two swap partitions
- Make sure you know how to optimize and properly initialize whatever you do use. For example, make sure it is formatted with a high number of inodes if you expect many files. Or, if using raid, align the stripe sizes to proper block sizes (like 64).
- Switch off filesystem’s logging of access times during mount. The main function of access time logging is to make your filesystem slower. Seriously. Nobody ever uses that feature. ‘mount -o noatime,nodiratime’
- I know there should only be ten rules, but seriously, practice safety and use truecrypt
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:28 pm
What’s the purpose of two swap partitions? Can’t two seperate installs share a single one?
March 5th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Superstition man. Pure superstition. Also, if one somehow screws up, you don’t want to be resizing partitions, formatting new drives, etc. Like the karate kid: “swapoff”, “swapon”.