[X4U] Lion and Partition size

[David Ledger]

At 15:49 -0400 3/5/12, Neil Laubenthal wrote:
>Partitioning used to be a great topic of discussion. These days I 
>think the only reasons to do it are to enable booting from multiple 
>versions of the OS (or Windows via Boot Camp) or if one wanted to 
>keep your /Users or /Applicaitons on a separate partition. It is 
>probably true that the boot partition is more likely to get 
>corrupted than other partitions; but I don't think the likelihood is 
>great enough to warrant partitioning unless one wants to anyway. 
>This was always one of those 'religious' arguments with each side 
>having all sorts of reasons why they were right and the other side 
>was wrong. I used to partition in the OS 9 and early OS X days; but 
>these days don't partition unless I have a reason for it.
>
>One good reason that I use is the Time Machine backup drive on my 
>file server (a Mini) that collects Time Machine backups from our 
>daily driver laptops. I gave this its own partition just to keep the 
>boot partition on the server from accidentally filling up. I also 
>have an external 1.5 TB drive that is partitioned and gets 
>occasional clones from the file server and both laptops so I have a 
>reasonably current bootable copy of the drives.

There used to be several reasons for partitioning drives for Unix.

Once Unix went with virtual memory you had to partition to get a swap 
partition. Swap files came later.

Each filesystem partition had its own i/o queue. More partitions gave 
you better i/o queuing.

Filling a system partition that was required to boot the system could 
be a disaster requiring downtime to make space manually. Keeping 
system partitions on their own prevented this most of the time.

The first doesn't apply to OS X. The second may not - I don't know 
much about the non-Unix internals of OS X. The third still applies, 
but the responsibility is put on the user not to fill the disc.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk