How to partition 300GB hard drive?
SQ
This is in Solaris 10.
Suggestions on how to partition a 300GB SAS hard drive during the
initial install?
SQ
Forgot to mention the machine has 4GB of RAM.
How much swap should I allocate?
Richard B. Gilbert
If this is an EIDE disk on a SPARC box, you will not be able to use
anything beyond the first 127 GB; it's a limitation in Sun's EIDE
controller! On an X86 box there's no problem.
Allow 10 GB for / plus /usr. Another 10 GB for /var and 4 GB for swap.
You can increase the size of either / or /var if you need more. Use the
rest as you will. The allocations for / plus /usr and for swap are
quite generous; if you anticipate a shortage of disk space you could
trim those 10 GB partitions down to 4 GB each.
Redoing the disk layout can be a real PITA. You have to back up
everything, repartition, and then restore everything. I shudder just
thinking about it!
Thad Floryan
wrote:
> SQ wrote:
> > This is in Solaris 10.
>
> > Suggestions on how to partition a 300GB SAS hard drive during the
> > initial install?
>
> Allow 10 GB for / plus /usr. Another 10 GB for /var and 4 GB for
> swap. You can increase the size of either / or /var if you need
> more. Use the rest as you will. The allocations for / plus /usr
> and for swap are quite generous; if you anticipate a shortage of
> disk space you could trim those 10 GB partitions down to 4 GB each.
>
> Redoing the disk layout can be a real PITA. You have to back up
> everything, repartition, and then restore everything. I shudder
> just thinking about it!
Precisely. Which is why I wonder why you recommended such small
partitions. Don't do much patching, huh? :-)
Unless one has a crystal ball and *knows* the future disk space
requirements, I've found it safest over the years to ignore the
20-year-old partitioning requirements of SunOS 4 and simply make
one large root partition to avoid artificial fences, barriers and
other impediments to computer usage. If any user(s) cause problems,
enable quotas. Here's how I partitioned my recent Solaris 10 box
last month:
bash-3.00# prtconf | grep Memory
Memory size: 3967 Megabytes
bash-3.00# df -h
Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c0d0s1 139G 5.7G 132G 5% /
/devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices
ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract
proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc
mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab
swap 6.7G 900K 6.7G 1% /etc/svc/volatile
objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object
/usr/lib/libc/libc_hwcap2.so.1
139G 5.7G 132G 5% /lib/libc.so.1
fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd
swap 6.7G 80K 6.7G 1% /tmp
swap 6.7G 24K 6.7G 1% /var/run
Benjamin Gawert
> This is in Solaris 10.
>
> Suggestions on how to partition a 300GB SAS hard drive during the
> initial install?
Unless you have specific requirements, I'd do at least a 4GB swap
partition and make the rest a single / partition (no separate /export/home).
Benjamin
Richard B. Gilbert
Where did you put your users?
Josh McKee
I suspect they're in the / partition since /export/home isn't
specifically listed.
Josh
SQ
> Unless you have specific requirements, I'd do at least a 4GB swap
> partition and make the rest a single / partition (no separate /export/home).
>
> Benjamin
Question, what would be the ideal amount of swap given 4GB of RAM?
Richard B. Gilbert
It depends! (God I love to be helpful!)
Anything from zero to 400 GB might meet your needs. We don't know what
your needs might be! Pick a number from 0 to 400 GB and try it.
You might consider which applications might be running simultaneously
and what their RAM requirements are. If the total exceeds 4 GB, you
will need some swap space. The total RAM requirements - 4 GB would
suggest the minimum required.
How much disk space can you devote to swap? How much inconvenience
would be involved in increasing the size of swap if you needed to?
Think of swap as virtual memory. More than six times the size of your
RAM is probably wasted; if you actually need that much for swapping your
system is likely to run like a dog!
Thad Floryan
> > [...]
> > Where did you put your users?
>
> I suspect they're in the / partition since /export/home isn't
> specifically listed.
That's correct. If I had filtered df per "df -h -F ufs" only
the root partition would have been displayed.
For my development systems for well over a decade I've had
only a single root partition for convenience, and for my
old Sun 3/60 systems 20+ years ago it was a necessity (esp.
when building, say, a complete X distribution (18+ hours)),
though given the size of disks back then on some each major
filesystem had its own disk. One system even had a dedicated
disk for swap.
Circa mid-1980s the largest SCSI disk was a Maxtor XT3380
at 380MB and US$2,500. It boggles my mind that today I can
buy a 1TB disk for less than $200. :-)
Thad Floryan
wrote
> [...]
> How much disk space can you devote to swap? How much inconvenience
> would be involved in increasing the size of swap if you needed to?
Trivial. Make a swap file and add it to the swap pool (assuming
there's enough free disk space for the swap file).
> Think of swap as virtual memory. More than six times the size of your
> RAM is probably wasted; if you actually need that much for swapping
> your system is likely to run like a dog!
A lot depends on what apps one's running; sometimes there's no
real choice. The performance of today's disk drives amazes me,
though.
If you want to see a "dog", I still have several AT&T 3B1 systems:
4MB maximum RAM and 80MB hard disks, yet they'll run gcc 1.37
compiling while editing with GNU Emacs while also playing a
graphical game such as asteroids. That's how I used to show them
off at the West Coast Computer Faire circa 1980s to early 1990s.
These 3B1 systems still boot and run; I booted one a few months
ago to retrieve some old files I wanted.
SQ
several 50GB partitions.
I also have one 20MB partition needed to mirror the two 300GB disks
via Solaris Volume Manager.
chunk...@mailinator.com
chunk...@mailinator.com
or if you can wait till mid. October 2008
-> http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/faqs_general.jsp
"Systems running Solaris 10 can now boot from ZFS and can use ZFS as
their root file system."
SQ
/faqs_general.jsp
>
> "Systems running Solaris 10 can now boot from ZFS and can use ZFS as
> their root file system."
Looks interesting. I just installed Solaris 10, 5/8 version.
I should upgrade later this year. I was only worried about mirroring
my production environment at this point, more or less.
Tried to burn a DVD - to no avail and ended up purchasing Solaris 10
from Sun. $35 tokens but it comes in both x86 and Sparc formats.
Richard B. Gilbert
$35 is not too bad. Imagine what you might have had to pay Microsoft
for a Windows CD/DVD!!