[X Newbies] Partitioning Drive?

[Steven Rogers]

On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 03:08 PM, Florin Alexander Neumann wrote:

>
> On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 15:06 Canada/Eastern, Randy B. Singer 
> wrote:
>
>> It's true that if you have a huge hard drive that each of several 
>> partitions will be plenty big, but then you have wasted a lot of 
>> space in one or more of your partitions.
>
> Why?

Obviously, the partitions only make sense if they have some rationale 
behind them. If you're just throwing applications and data of all types 
across all your partitions, then you're no more likely to run out of 
space on one than the other. But the key is that usually there is some 
scheme where files of a certain type or use go in one partition, and 
the whole question is how big it has to be, and what happens if you 
guess too small or too large.

I used partitions for years in a Sun environment where we backed up by 
dumping raw partitions and the backup *was* tied to the partition 
scheme and what gets saved and what doesn't (a bad idea, IMO) - and I 
can sure tell you that there are plenty of times you run out of space 
in one partition and wind up creating cross-partition links to balance 
things out.  Its tolerable if you know your system and work with it 
every day, but sure not something I'd advise a newbie to do. Primarily 
because there's nothing to gain from it and plenty of things to risk 
(like picking wrong partition sizes).

SR