When I build systems - those of you who remember I am not a linux guy but rather FreeBSD - I do something like this: Say I have 3TB drive like you cite... and 8GB RAM [/] 250GB [/var] 1TB [/usr/home] 1.5TB [/usr/ports] 5GB [/usr/www] 250GB [swap] 16GB This is approximate but I build servers... so a large /var is almost required. If your flavor has a package build directory I would give that an explicit size rather than let it grow to file your entire FS. And I also have a fixed size for my web hosting directory... My two bits. On May 4, 2012, at 11:49 AM, Mike Miller wrote: > I know that the way most people partition hard drives now is by making a partition for swap and one for /, and that might be all they do. That is convenient in some ways because when a directory needs more space, it can access it, if it exists. On the other hand, with more partitions, a directory can only grow to the size of the partition, so partitions limit the growth of directories. > > Of course, limiting the growth of directories is often a good thing. Without partition boundaries constraining growth, if a log file in /var is growing at a rate of 1 MB/sec, it won't take long for it to fill up all of the free space on the entire hard drive, and when that happens it may bring down the system. So maybe I should use a /var partition to prevent excessive log growth from shutting down the system, but I don't know what is an appropriate size for /var? It looks like my current /var is only using about 1 GB, but HDD space is cheap enough that I could give it 10 GB and not feel like I'm missing anything. What would you recommend? > > I'll want to put most of my space into /home, but how much do you think I should leave for /? On my current system, / (after excluding both /var and /home) is only using about 54 GB, and it seems to have a lot of extra programs in it that I wouldn't use in the future, so I think 100 GB should be enough. What do you think? Is 100 GB for / good enough? > > If I used 10 GB for /var and 100 GB for /, that would leave about 2.6 TB for /home. These 3TB drives seem to be the cheapest option, per byte, right now, so I expect a lot of you will have them soon, if you don't already. > > Mike > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list