On Sun, 25 Sep 2011 19:19:45 -0700, Marc Shapiro wrote: > Now that I have my Seagate 1TB drive functional and recognized by Linux, > I need to format the thing. As I mentioned in my previous thread, my > current boot drive on this box is only 40 GB. I intend to keep it as > the boot drive and use the new drive primarily for extra storage.
Have you considered in making the new big disk the default one? You can easily clone the current system into the new disk, step which will not require a full installation and you will gain: 1/ Extra space for your system files 2/ Extra speed for the system itself While a new hard disk can be a two-edged sword (old disk can be start failing at any time due to the MTBF but a new hard disk is also a risk) I would reconsider that option. > Since I don't do regular backups (I already know what you will say > about that) I am also wondering what I might be able to do, now that I > have space, for a little added security in that matter. Perhaps I > could just copy the 40GB boot drive to a backup directory tree and keep > it updated with rsync, or some such? Any ideas on that? Yes, that's an option. Or maybe you can use software raid (raid1) to keep in sync 2 partitions (one at the IDE unit and other at the SATA disk), I think this can be done with linux sw raid while I'm not completely sure and given they're using different speed buses maybe is not even desiderable because of false possitives (raid drops), hum... :-? > My main question, however, was partitioning the 1TB drive. I have never > had this much space to deal with. While it may be technically possible > to simply make one big partition, I am guessing that it is probably not > a practical way to do it (and I will want several different partitions, > anyway). That's right. Partition the drive, at least with x2 ~500 GiB volumes if you want to store big files on it, or x4 volumes of ~250 GiB. > If I am using ext3 partitions with neither vast numbers of tiny files, > nor small numbers of monstrously large files, what is a reasonable > maximum size for a partition that will be easy on the file system and > the drive, itself? If you are planning to use the big disk for data storage "only", I think that would not matter so much, but still, I would keep at least 2 partitions :-). Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.09.26.17.56...@gmail.com
