[SLUG] Multiple Disk Strategy

[Gavin Baker]

On Sun, 2004-10-24 at 18:18 +0100, Stephen wrote:

> 1) What filesystem would you recommend for a partition that is intended 
> for data only - my system uses ext3, but is that overkill given the 
> whole journalling thing? Would I be better using a lighterweight 
> filesystem ... or am I missing the point?

We are spoilt for choice.

Ext3, IBM's JFS, SGI's XFS, Namesys's Reiserfs are all solid, and all
included in current kernel.org kernels.

All support Journalling, and it adds almost 0 overhead.
All support POSIX ACL's except reiser (although it does have extended
attributes).
Ext3 and XFS support Security Labels (For SELinux and other security
modules).
Reisers' Btree approach seems to win the races when the filesystem
contains *lots* of small files.
None of them are slow.
They don't all support quotas.
Some of them allow you to resize the filesystem without unmounting it.

So I guess it depends on what you want.

Or, roll a dice? :)

I use ext3. It's never let me down. It's been around for ever. It can be
mounted as ext2 so even really old distro's can fix an ext3 partition.


> 2) What would be the best strategy for using the space on a disk 
> separate from the main system? I mean, I imagine that I should just move 
> the entire /home directory to the 2nd disk... but will that break things 
> if I make /home a symbolic link to the other filesystem... or can I 
> mount the 2nd disk on /home???? Or am I doing the windows solution? - 
> what would a linux user do? I imagine that moving the user data to a 
> separate disk would increase overall performance... or would it?

I would just mount the new partition in a temporary place. Copy the
contents of /home/ there (use cp's -a !). Make sure everything copies :)
Then rm the contents of my old /home, and update /etc/fstab to point to
the new home partition. umount'ing/mount'ing as I went...Simplest way.

I wouldn't think this would make much of a performance difference.
Although if you put, maybe /usr/lib on a separate IDE channel to /, that
probably would.

You might want to have a look at LVM/EVMS too. That way you can add all
your spare drives/partitions to a volume group, and add/remove/resize
partitions at will.

Have fun! :)

Regards,
Gav

ps, hi everyone! Long time huh :)