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Lots of SCSI disks/PartitionsLots of SCSI disks/PartitionsPosted Mar 18, 2004 6:46 UTC (Thu) by wolfrider (guest, #3105)Parent article: Lots of SCSI disks --That is a Truly Neat Hack. I don't understand it, but the explanation given in the article by the Editor is sufficient for me. --AFA having more than 15 partitions on one disk - WHY?? It's generally better to just add disks; that way you're usually looking at less impact if one particular device fails. --Can anybody come up with a good real-world reason to have >15 partitions on one device? I mean, my setup looks like this: hda: (80GB) hdb: (80GB) --I think the largest number of partitions I've ever had on 1 device went up to 13, but that was before restructuring. If anyone can come up with a valid and -necessary- scheme for having 16 or more partitions, I'd really like to see it. --OTOH, *BSD has a partition scheme that uses "slices" - which are basically sub-partitions. I dunno exactly how well the Linux kernel currently supports UFS(? might be FFS) filesystem writing or formatting, but might be something to consider.
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Lots of SCSI disks/Partitions Posted Mar 18, 2004 8:15 UTC (Thu) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Can anybody come up with a good real-world reason to have >15 partitions on one device? It's needed if you want many OSes on the same machine for testing and cannot stand more noise from additional drives. Don't forget that BSD subpartitions (disklabel) also count in Linux as partitions. Imagine installing Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD on the same machine in the default configuration, i.e. with separate swap and /usr partitions. That will put you very close to the limit.
18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64) Posted Mar 18, 2004 22:25 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] > Can anybody come up with a good real-world> reason to have >15 partitions on one device? I recently ran into that question here, on my (luckily IDE, as IDE allows 64 partitions) 250G drive, as I considered installing Gentoo dual-boot on my current Mandrake system. I do have a second, older, disk, but it contains a backup installation useful for when my main drive won't boot because I hosed something up, and for critical personal data backup. I don't want to change that, at least until/unless Gentoo becomes my primary distrib so I don't have the possibility of having the regular Mandrake system hosed by updates, while Gentoo may also not yet be operational or is itself hosed. Now, this wouldn't apply to corporate installations, and SCSI tends to be used more in that environment than in the home, since IDE is cheaper if more limited and slower, but yes, there ARE reasons to have more than 16 partitions, for some of us. FWIW, here's my layout and why I needed more than 16 partitons (hmm, looks better tabulated, but don't want to bother with the html). hda## mntpt comment 01 /boot 02 / 03 /mnt/rtm rootmirror, always keep a / backup 04 -- extended partition mapping 05 swap 06 /usr 07 /var 08 /tmp 09 /opt 10 /usr/local 11 /home 12 /mnt/news dedicated usenet cache 13 /mnt/mail dedicated mail partition 14 /mnt/mm dedicated multimedia Those are my Mandrake partitions. As I got set to install Gentoo, I remembered reading about a 16 partition limit, and had to go look it up and find (to my great relief) that IDE had a larger 64 partition limit. Here's how I set that up (as listed in my mandrake fstab: boot, tmp, mail, news, opt, swap, mm, and home, are to be shared) 15 /mnt/g g=gentoo, thus, the gentoo root 16 /mnt/g/mnt/rtm root-mirror for gentoo 17 /mnt/g/usr gentoo's /usr 18 /mnt/g/var 19 /mnt/g/usr/local That still doesn't include dedicated /var/log partitions, one for each distrib, likely shared public www, p2p, and ftp partitions, if I were so inclined, or any MSWormOS partitions, since I am MS free (the only proprietary-ware I believe I still have is my original Master of Orion game, which I continue to play on occasion using a DOSBox VM). In addition, further distribs or other OSs, the BSDs, for instance, if I were to install any of them, would take up further multiple partitions. BTW, on that 250G drive, with the above 19 partitions (well, 18, since hda4 is virtual), I still have over 100G of unpartitioned free space to eventually expand into, so I'm definitely glad, with that sort of space around, that IDE does more than 16 partitions. <g> Duncan
Re: 18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64) Posted Mar 23, 2004 2:38 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] Can anybody come up with a good real-world reason to have >15 partitions on one device?FWIW, here's my layout and why I needed more than 16 partitons (hmm, looks better tabulated, but don't want to bother with the html). I've also had 20 or more on a single system; some of the reasons:
These days I still do the read-only and CD-R things, but I'm trying to trim things where possible. My backup disks are single-partition monsters (read-only, of course, and spun down 99% of the time). Greg
18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64) Posted Mar 23, 2004 6:26 UTC (Tue) by wolfrider (guest, #3105) [Link] --I see your point... However, I suppose my "need" for more partitions has been largely bypassed due to using Vmware Workstation. (Note - I have no affiliation, blahblahblah; just a satisfied customer.)--For testing purposes, or even virtual servers, Vmware is really well done - separate "disks" are merely files on an existing partition, which makes backups really easy. (Although you can in fact give the virtual machine access to the real disk hardware; I was using this method to access my Win98 files in-situ from a VM for a while.) --By using Vmware, I was able (for instance) to beta-test the Knoppix DVD without allocating any additional disk space (even though I didn't have a DVD burner at the time) simply by booting the VM directly from the ISO file; vmware can treat an ISO as a CDROM drive. --If you have a need/want for constantly testing new distros (Linux, *BSD, etc - I've become something of a live-cd addict) without the repartitioning involved, I would seriously consider trying Vmware. It's ~$300 for the 1st purchase, but only $99 for upgrades -- and they have a 30-day free trial IIRC. It's come in quite handy over the years - I'm still on version 3.x, and I believe the current rev is 4.x now. (I might have to upgrade eventually though; my 3.x is having trouble with Linux kernel 2.6.x.) (Side note - I've run VM's with only 128MB of RAM installed, on a Pentium 233; but it runs better with higher specs. On my AMD Duron 900 with 512MB, you can hardly tell the difference between a VM and the native OS. YMMV. About the only thing vmware is NOT good at, are 3D-intense apps - such as FPS games - and 3.x has a few problems with sound. I think they fixed the sound issue in 4.x tho.) ( http://www.vmware.com ) ( http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop/ws_features.html )
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