[CentOS] A question about RAID and partitions

Wed May 23 15:56:14 UTC 2007
Brent L. Bates <blbates at vigyan.com>

     I have 3 partitions:

	/boot	- Because it can't be striped.  It is mirrored across 4
		  drives on 2 controllers, just so the disk space isn't
		  completely wasted.  The partitions are there, so I'm
		  using them.  Each drive is also bootable as I used GRUB
		  on each one.

	swap	- 1 partition on 4 drives on 2 controllers and I just let
		  the OS handle the swap space anyway it wants to do and I
		  don't use any software RAID options. All 4 partitions have
		  `defaults,pri=1' in the /etc/fstab file.

	/	- 1 partition on 4 drives on 2 controllers all striped
		  together as one file system.

     I've found over the years any more partitioning than that is just a waste
of disk space.  If I had more partitions, I usually ended up with one
partition with a lot of excess space and others with not enough.  It was just
easier to have everything together.  On the current system we have about 600GB
of disk space available with only 5% of it used.  I'm not worried about
anything getting filled up any time soon.
     Users who fill up drives get shot and then chastised.  :-)