Setting up a new machine with 2 HD

Question

Here's the partitioning scheme I set up on a machine with 2 80GB drives:

SDA

1) root = 15G

2) swap = 4G

3) home = 60G

Ok? Or is there a better scenario?

Then the partitioner shows the second drive:

SDB which is 80G and I'm not sure which mount point I should set for the second drive, so I just labeled it as an unused partition for now. Should it be set to /home in order to use the space? Also, I'll replace this one with a bigger drive eventually. With that in mind, what is the best way to deal with the second drive?

Thanks.

Answer 1

For a home machine, your chosen set of partitions is great - having /home separate means that you can move it around and upgrade your OS with ease. Since you have the second disk now, you could put /home on it for now and move it to the new drive when it arrives. Then the upgrade steps would be:

• install the new drive in the machine beside the existing ones (3 drives at once temporarily)
• format the new drive with a big partition and mount it anywhere
• copy all of your data from your current /home to the new partition
• remove the old drive and plug the new one in where it was

If your new drive is plugged into the same spot as the old one was (and has the same number of partitions), it should be detected with the same drive/partition id (eg sdb1), and you shouldn't even need to edit /etc/fstab.

[edit: clarified that you would need the same partition scheme on the replacement drive to get the same drive/partition id]

Answer 2

I'd probably put /home/ on the second drive not in a partition of the first. Specially if you are going to replace it. Just for the extra space.

Answer 3

Personally I would wait, putting it in just to take it back out doesn't make sense. If you have no special needs and just want a lot of space you could do like this: (i will imagine that the new disk is a 320GB just for kicks ;)

sda1  /       75GB
sda2  "swap"  5GB
sdb1  /home   320GB

But there are a lot of different ways to set up disks these days! You could also use LVM or Software RAID (try asking google or make another question here) but it's properly not for first time Linux users since this is quite critical :o A software raid0 solution could look like:

sda1 /       20GB
sda2 "swap"  5GB
rd0  /home   385GB (sda3 65GB + sdb1 320GB)

Personally i would just do the first example, but the choice is yours...

Answer 4

I like a partitioning scheme like this:

• / around 50GB
• swap 2xram space
• /media/big space for movies, mp3s, games, ...
• I had a partition for /home/user/.wine because Windows games take a lot of space, but lately I had trouble because wine couldn't use the files of the old installation

Advantage of putting the space under /media and not /home: if you want a clean install it's much easier like this. And I don't know if you can use the same /home partition for different Linux OS. Furthermore you could make your space partition NTFS to share it with a Windows installation.

Answer 5

If you're going to keep having two drives, I recommend that you put them to good use: replicate all your important files on the two drives. It's called software RAID1; Linux supports this reliably and efficiently. That means your disk partitions would look like this:

first disk            second disk
sda1  md0             sdb1  md0
sda2  swap            sdb2  swap
sda3  /LARGE          sdb3  /MORE

md0 is a RAID1 volume; sda1 and sdb1 automatically contain identical data. That way, if one of your disks fails, you don't lose any important files, and you can continue working with your computer until you get the failed disk replaced.

md0 would contain two partitions: / (for the operating system) and /home (for your important data — stuff that you created, as opposed to stuff that you downloaded or ripped or compiled from somewhere). I like to have 20GB for the OS (I install a lot more programs than the average user). It's hard to say how large /home should be: it depends what data you (plan to) have that you consider important.

The Ubuntu installer can create RAID1 volumes, but you need the “alternate” or “server” installer, not the default “desktop” installer.