[sclug] Newbie, partitioning 120Gb HDD - recommendations?

[David Newcomb]

Reply to Tom & Alex,

When the machine boots up the partition table is read.
For each partition there is a superblock which contains all the inodes
and addressing information for that partition.

If you have 1 root partition at the start and (therefore faster outermost
rim of the disc) then everything that needs to be read or writen can
be accessed extremly fast. Only 1 super node structure is held in memory.
All the information can be read in a series of sequental reads.

If you have serveral partitions then there is a superblock structure
for each of the partitions, which are spread across the whole disc.
Read & write operations cause the disc heads to jump to each of the
superblock structures for each partition as they read and write.

The test [if you can call them that:)] was 2 complete installs on
the same machine. One with 1 root partition and the other with
serveral partition. We noted that machine was much faster with just
one root partition.

Be sides the only reason they invented partitioning was because :
1. they wanted to address a whole disk using a fixed size address
(can't remember what size). Remember all that trouble with LBA?
2. The partition segrates all the pieces of disc into managable
chunks so that if part of the disk becomes currupted that file
allocation tables are more distributed.

All the rest it overhead.

Regards,
David.