Disk partition size vs. performance

[jjscott]

I'm upgrading from a 40 to a 250 GB drive and I'm wondering if there are any performance considerations that I should be aware of when deciding the size of my main partition.

Will I see a performance hit if I allocate all remaining space to the main partition after setting up my boot and backup partitions as opposed to setting the main partition to say 100GB and then leaving the remaining space unallocated? If I allocate all remaining space to the main partition as stated above it would be about 200GB.

This is for Cent 5.6 on an Ext3 filesystem.

BTW, what is the recommended size for the boot partition?

Thanks

[Lazydog]

You could leave the setup configure your drive for you.
you shouldn't need a big /boot partition. 50g should be more then enough.

[jjscott]

50 GB for a boot partition? Really? I believe the way the system is currently setup the boot partition is 100MB.

[oz]

50 GB for a boot partition? Really? I believe the way the system is currently setup the boot partition is 100MB.

I think that was a typo and he actually meant 50MB is enough. You should be fine with 100MB if that's what you already have.

[devils casper]

Linux installer allocates 102 MB space to /boot partition and that is more than enough for any system unless you want to keep a lot of new/old kernel versions. Partition structure of any system depends on its intended usage. Are you going to use it as Server or just an average desktop machine?

In any case, consider allocating large chunk of disk space to separate /home partition instead of /.

[Rubberman]

My system drive is 320GB. It has an 8GB /boot partition, of which only 350MB are used. Swap is 16GB. / is the rest, about 280GB of which about 40 are in use. /home is on a 4 drive LVM of 2TB, which is about 1/2 used. In any case, the system disc partitioning was automatic when I installed Scientific Linux 6, but my old CentOS 5.x system partitioned it much the same. In any case, I like plenty of space on / so I don't worry about running out of space when I install new packages and other software.

[Iwuvnix]

Doubt it matters all that much. Biggest hurdles you're going to come up against in terms of hdd performance are the properties of the drive itself ... Seek time, rpm, quality brand ... yada, yada. Partitioning schemes seem to be mainly a personal preference among the nix communities and vary greatly from user to user.

Overall though would say any performance boost you could expect from sweating it wouldn't be much of anything worth losing sleep over, shrugs.

[Lazydog]

Originally Posted by jjscott View Post
50 GB for a boot partition? Really? I believe the way the system is currently setup the boot partition is 100MB.

I think that was a typo and he actually meant 50MB is enough. You should be fine with 100MB if that's what you already have.

Yeah, that was a typo sorry if you got excited by that.

Here is how my system is setup

~ $ df
Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1      ext3    190G  4.8G  175G   3% /
/dev/md2      ext3     48G  1.7G   44G   4% /home
/dev/md0      ext3    487M   29M  433M   7% /boot

As it has been said already partitions are a matter of choice/need.