Why partition disks?

[Andy Clews]

Someone else has already mentioned that partitioning does positively
affect performance, but you should also look at it from the practical
point of view.  Dividing different stuff into partitions means that you
can do dumps at varying intervals for stuff that's of varying
importance.  For example, we have a /scratch partition (used for
temporary work files and as a "parking" area) that is never dumped,
whereas the user partitions are dumped daily.  Having everything on one
partition forces you to dump everything and thus use more tape. 

You might also want to build file systems with different block sizes in
order to improve fragmentation. For example, our /news partition has
small block sizes due to large number of inodes and relatively small
mean file sizes. The user partitions have a wider spectrum of file size,
and not so many inodes, so are built with larger block sizes.

Should any serious corruption occur it will be far more disruptive to
have to rebuild one large partition, rather than to rebuild just a
single partition out of several.

Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, England
JANET: andy at syma.sussex.ac.uk   BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk at uk.ac


-- 
Andy Clews, Computing Service, Univ. of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN, England
JANET: andy at syma.sussex.ac.uk   BITNET: andy%syma.sussex.ac.uk at uk.ac