Re: 18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64) [LWN.net]

Re: 18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64)

Posted Mar 23, 2004 2:38 UTC (Tue) by roelofs (guest, #2599)
In reply to: 18 partitions here (on IDE, which allows 64) by Duncan
Parent article: Lots of SCSI disks

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:

I like to have system dirs mounted read-only where possible; it's hard to mount / as "read-only except for var and etc and tmp".
I like to download directly into a CD-sized partition for ~ quick burning of archives without moving a lot of files around (and I like to have at least two or three such partitions since I don't always get the sorting/burning done right away, nor the cleaning-out part after the burn).
In the old days, Linux didn't handle swap partitions bigger than 128 MB. I usually had three or four.
OS/2 partitions (including boot mangler), DOS partitions, etc...

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

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