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Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box?

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  Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Steve <tinker123@gmail.com> - 2012-05-20 05:57 -0700
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? J G Miller <miller@yoyo.ORG> - 2012-05-20 13:06 +0000
      Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2012-05-20 19:02 +0100
        Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> - 2012-05-20 23:19 +0200
          Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2012-05-22 04:28 +0000
            Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> - 2012-05-22 09:40 +0200
          Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Stan Bischof <stan@worldbadminton.com> - 2012-06-01 17:22 +0000
            Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> - 2012-06-03 19:12 +0200
              Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? J G Miller <miller@yoyo.ORG> - 2012-06-04 01:01 +0000
                Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> - 2012-06-04 09:37 +0200
                  Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? J G Miller <miller@yoyo.ORG> - 2012-06-04 14:46 +0000
                    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david@westcontrol.removethisbit.com> - 2012-06-05 09:18 +0200
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Sam <sam@email-scan.com> - 2012-05-20 08:31 -0500
      Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? notbob <notbob@nothome.com> - 2012-05-20 13:46 +0000
        Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Robert Heller <heller@deepsoft.com> - 2012-05-20 09:03 -0500
      [OT] Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? James Moe <jimoeDESPAM@sohnen-moe.com> - 2012-05-21 12:43 -0700
        Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Sam <sam@email-scan.com> - 2012-05-21 16:48 -0500
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? David Brown <david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> - 2012-05-20 17:41 +0200
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Bit Twister <BitTwister@mouse-potato.com> - 2012-05-20 17:18 +0000
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2012-05-20 18:58 +0100
      Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Richard Kettlewell <rjk@greenend.org.uk> - 2012-05-20 19:53 +0100
    Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box? Danno <WhoaBaby@MySecretPlace.org> - 2012-05-31 12:01 -0600

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#5351 — Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box?

I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having Kubuntu
12.04 installed on the hard drive.

Shopping around, it seems like 1 TB hard drives are the norm.

I would also like to install a virtual machine on this new PC to run
Windows for the occasional use where I just can't get something on
Linux ( for example, streaming Netflix ).    I would also like to be
able to experiment with the occasional "new" linux distro, without
jeopardizing my main Kubuntu install or VM set up.

I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
much on a TB hard drive? ).

Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?

A friend at work suggested multiple hard drives, he said they could be
set up so that I wouldn't have to dual boot.    Is there any values in
this?

Thanks much in advance for any tips

Steve

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#5352

On Sunday, May 20th, 2012, at 05:57:02h -0700, Steve wrote:

> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having
> Kubuntu 12.04 installed on the hard drive.

If you want performance, get two hard drives installed.

Put /, /boot, /usr, /opt, /home OR /srv on the first
and /usr/lib, /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/src, /var
and /srv OR /home on the second.

Have a swap partition on each of say 1 GB, and specify
that the swap on the second disk has a higher priority
than the swap on the first.

This arrangement has been recommended for about 10 years
or so ...

See the Unix Multi Disk HOWTO for further details and
recommendations for how to arrange partitions over even
more disks for maximum performance.

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#5361

J G Miller wrote:
> On Sunday, May 20th, 2012, at 05:57:02h -0700, Steve wrote:
> 
>> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having
>> Kubuntu 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
> 
> If you want performance, get two hard drives installed.
> 
> Put /, /boot, /usr, /opt, /home OR /srv on the first
> and /usr/lib, /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/src, /var
> and /srv OR /home on the second.
> 
> Have a swap partition on each of say 1 GB, and specify
> that the swap on the second disk has a higher priority
> than the swap on the first.
> 
> This arrangement has been recommended for about 10 years
> or so ...
> 

....so is ten years out of date...

Frankly with the amount of RAM and caching that goes on, a single disk 
aint that much of an issue on a single user system.

I used to do stuff that way on small memoried multi-user computers, but 
I finally gave up on it and just had one bloody great partition so I 
dint run out of /tmp or /var or /home  unless I run out of total disk space.



> See the Unix Multi Disk HOWTO for further details and
> recommendations for how to arrange partitions over even
> more disks for maximum performance.


-- 
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

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#5364

On 20/05/12 20:02, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> J G Miller wrote:
>> On Sunday, May 20th, 2012, at 05:57:02h -0700, Steve wrote:
>>
>>> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having
>>> Kubuntu 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
>>
>> If you want performance, get two hard drives installed.
>>
>> Put /, /boot, /usr, /opt, /home OR /srv on the first
>> and /usr/lib, /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/src, /var
>> and /srv OR /home on the second.
>>
>> Have a swap partition on each of say 1 GB, and specify
>> that the swap on the second disk has a higher priority
>> than the swap on the first.
>>
>> This arrangement has been recommended for about 10 years
>> or so ...
>>
>
> ....so is ten years out of date...
>
> Frankly with the amount of RAM and caching that goes on, a single disk
> aint that much of an issue on a single user system.
>
> I used to do stuff that way on small memoried multi-user computers, but
> I finally gave up on it and just had one bloody great partition so I
> dint run out of /tmp or /var or /home unless I run out of total disk space.
>

And if you /do/ want to use two disks, you'd be daft to split it up this 
way.  You would use raid10 (almost certainly in the "far" layout) to get 
the safety of mirroring plus performance that averages more than double 
the speed of a single drive (though synchronised writes are a little 
slower).

If you want to split up your filesystem (sometimes it makes sense) 
beyond a simple / and /home, then I'd recommend LVM for flexibility.

And put /tmp on tmpfs.

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#5394

On 2012-05-20, David Brown <david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> wrote:
> On 20/05/12 20:02, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> J G Miller wrote:
>>> On Sunday, May 20th, 2012, at 05:57:02h -0700, Steve wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having
>>>> Kubuntu 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
>>>
>>> If you want performance, get two hard drives installed.
>>>
>>> Put /, /boot, /usr, /opt, /home OR /srv on the first
>>> and /usr/lib, /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/src, /var
>>> and /srv OR /home on the second.
>>>
>>> Have a swap partition on each of say 1 GB, and specify
>>> that the swap on the second disk has a higher priority
>>> than the swap on the first.
>>>
>>> This arrangement has been recommended for about 10 years
>>> or so ...
>>>
>>
>> ....so is ten years out of date...
>>
>> Frankly with the amount of RAM and caching that goes on, a single disk
>> aint that much of an issue on a single user system.
>>
>> I used to do stuff that way on small memoried multi-user computers, but
>> I finally gave up on it and just had one bloody great partition so I
>> dint run out of /tmp or /var or /home unless I run out of total disk space.
>>
>
> And if you /do/ want to use two disks, you'd be daft to split it up this 
> way.  You would use raid10 (almost certainly in the "far" layout) to get 
> the safety of mirroring plus performance that averages more than double 
> the speed of a single drive (though synchronised writes are a little 
> slower).
>
> If you want to split up your filesystem (sometimes it makes sense) 
> beyond a simple / and /home, then I'd recommend LVM for flexibility.
>
> And put /tmp on tmpfs.

Do to useful RAID 10, you need at least four disks.  Four-disk
RAID 10 is wonderful.  The advice I found when researching it was
to use disks intended for RAID, definitely not "green" units.  If
you can, avoid getting multiple of the same model and production
lot--buy any units of the same model a month or two apart in
time.  Oh, and make sure to use a UPS and try to avoid kernel
crashes.

I took care to make sure I have two different models in each
mirror pair.  That way, even if both units of the same model die
simultaneously, I still have my data.

Measuring 480MB/s sequential reads from a four-disk RAID10 is a
very sweet experience.

-- 
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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#5396

On 22/05/2012 06:28, Robert Riches wrote:
> On 2012-05-20, David Brown<david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no>  wrote:
>> On 20/05/12 20:02, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>> J G Miller wrote:
>>>> On Sunday, May 20th, 2012, at 05:57:02h -0700, Steve wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having
>>>>> Kubuntu 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
>>>>
>>>> If you want performance, get two hard drives installed.
>>>>
>>>> Put /, /boot, /usr, /opt, /home OR /srv on the first
>>>> and /usr/lib, /usr/local, /usr/share, /usr/src, /var
>>>> and /srv OR /home on the second.
>>>>
>>>> Have a swap partition on each of say 1 GB, and specify
>>>> that the swap on the second disk has a higher priority
>>>> than the swap on the first.
>>>>
>>>> This arrangement has been recommended for about 10 years
>>>> or so ...
>>>>
>>>
>>> ....so is ten years out of date...
>>>
>>> Frankly with the amount of RAM and caching that goes on, a single disk
>>> aint that much of an issue on a single user system.
>>>
>>> I used to do stuff that way on small memoried multi-user computers, but
>>> I finally gave up on it and just had one bloody great partition so I
>>> dint run out of /tmp or /var or /home unless I run out of total disk space.
>>>
>>
>> And if you /do/ want to use two disks, you'd be daft to split it up this
>> way.  You would use raid10 (almost certainly in the "far" layout) to get
>> the safety of mirroring plus performance that averages more than double
>> the speed of a single drive (though synchronised writes are a little
>> slower).
>>
>> If you want to split up your filesystem (sometimes it makes sense)
>> beyond a simple / and /home, then I'd recommend LVM for flexibility.
>>
>> And put /tmp on tmpfs.
>
> Do to useful RAID 10, you need at least four disks.  Four-disk
> RAID 10 is wonderful.  The advice I found when researching it was
> to use disks intended for RAID, definitely not "green" units.  If
> you can, avoid getting multiple of the same model and production
> lot--buy any units of the same model a month or two apart in
> time.  Oh, and make sure to use a UPS and try to avoid kernel
> crashes.
>
> I took care to make sure I have two different models in each
> mirror pair.  That way, even if both units of the same model die
> simultaneously, I still have my data.
>
> Measuring 480MB/s sequential reads from a four-disk RAID10 is a
> very sweet experience.
>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#Linux_MD_RAID_10>

Most hardware raid cards limit you to using multiples of 4 disks for 
raid10.  But on Linux, you can usefully do raid10 on two or more disks, 
including odd numbers.

Because of the way the data is laid out in raid10,far2 arrangement, your 
reads are always from the outer halves of the disks and therefore give 
significantly faster bandwidth than average access, as well as 
significantly lower seek times (the head movement is typically much 
smaller).  Of course, your writes are slower - but in most use cases, 
reads are much more common than writes, and caching in ram negates the 
effect of write latencies (while read latencies are always visible).

This is why raid10,far2 outperforms raid0 on the same number of disks in 
most situations, and will also outperform "traditional" raid10 on four 
disks (made of a raid0 of two raid1 pairs).

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#5445

David Brown <david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no> wrote:
> 
> And if you /do/ want to use two disks, you'd be daft to split it up this 
> way.  You would use raid10 (almost certainly in the "far" layout) to get 
> the safety of mirroring plus performance that averages more than double 
> the speed of a single drive (though synchronised writes are a little 
> slower).
> 

so--- how does one get RAID10 ( striping plus mirroring )
on just two disks?

Stan

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#5478

On 01/06/12 19:22, Stan Bischof wrote:
> David Brown<david.brown@removethis.hesbynett.no>  wrote:
>>
>> And if you /do/ want to use two disks, you'd be daft to split it up this
>> way.  You would use raid10 (almost certainly in the "far" layout) to get
>> the safety of mirroring plus performance that averages more than double
>> the speed of a single drive (though synchronised writes are a little
>> slower).
>>
>
> so--- how does one get RAID10 ( striping plus mirroring )
> on just two disks?
>
> Stan


There are different Linux software RAID10 layouts, but the most 
interesting one is the "far" layout.  Very roughly, you can think of 
taking disk "a" and dividing it into two partitions, a1 and a2. 
Similarly, divide disk "b" into b1 and b2.  Join a1 and b2 to a mirror, 
and a2 and b1 to a mirror.  Then put these two mirrors together as a stripe.

Your layout for logical data blocks 1, 2, 3, ... looks like this:

A	B
-	-
1	2
3	4
5	6
...	...
2	1
4	3
6	5
...	...

Each block is written twice - a mirrored copy on each disk.  That gives 
you raid1 and your safety.  But consecutive blocks are written as 
stripes across both disks - that gives you your striped speed at reading 
streams of data.  And all reads are done in the outer half of the disk, 
which has significantly faster throughput than the inner half, and means 
that disk head movement is much smaller (an average of something like a 
third or a quarter), and thus faster - you get the speed advantages of 
"short-stroking".

The only time you get slower access is during writes, since you have to 
make a second copy on the inner half of the disk.  But that has much 
less of an impact, since reads normally heavily outweigh writes, and 
buffering and caching can hide much of the extra latency.



<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_RAID_levels#Linux_MD_RAID_10>

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#5487

On Sunday, June 3rd, 2012, at 19:12:10h +0200, David Brown wrote:

> Each block is written twice - a mirrored copy on each disk.

And what safety of mirroring does this provide in the event
that either disk fails?

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#5491

On 04/06/2012 03:01, J G Miller wrote:
> On Sunday, June 3rd, 2012, at 19:12:10h +0200, David Brown wrote:
>
>> Each block is written twice - a mirrored copy on each disk.
>
> And what safety of mirroring does this provide in the event
> that either disk fails?
>

I thought I was being clear, especially with the diagram and the link to 
the wikipedia article with explanations and diagrams.  Please don't 
think I'm trying to be patronising with this - I am just trying to 
provoke an "aha" moment of understanding.

For each block of data to be written on the raid10 set, one copy is 
placed in the first half of one disk, and another copy is placed in the 
second half of the other disk.

So each block of data is written to both disks.

If one disk dies (or has permanent read errors in a disk block), there 
is another copy of the same data on the other disk.

Clearly, access to the degraded array (i.e., when one disk is dead) is a 
bit slow, since the data is "striped" between the first half and the 
second half of the disk.  But the key point is that it is all there.

Look again at the diagram:

A    B
-    -
1    2
3    4
5    6
...    ...
2    1
4    3
6    5
...    ...


Logical block 1 is written to the first half of disk A, and the second 
half of disk B.  Logical block 2 is written to the first half of disk B, 
and the second half of disk B.

If disk B dies, you have disk A:

A
-
1
3
5
...
2
4
6
...

As you can see, all the logical blocks are still there.

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#5496

On Monday, June 4th, 2012, at 09:37:54h +0200, David Brown wrote:

> Please don't think I'm trying to be patronising with this

Not at all.

> Look again at the diagram:

Due to the lateness of the hour I was concentrating on the text,
so looking at the diagram more closely, all now does become clear.

> If disk B dies, you have disk A:

Thank you for the explanation.

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#5512

On 04/06/2012 16:46, J G Miller wrote:
> On Monday, June 4th, 2012, at 09:37:54h +0200, David Brown wrote:
>
>> Please don't think I'm trying to be patronising with this
>
> Not at all.
>
>> Look again at the diagram:
>
> Due to the lateness of the hour I was concentrating on the text,
> so looking at the diagram more closely, all now does become clear.
>
>> If disk B dies, you have disk A:
>
> Thank you for the explanation.

Now comes the pop quiz - draw a diagram for the layout of raid10,f2 over 
three disks :-)  (I've actually used that setup.)

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#5353

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

Steve writes:

> I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
> much on a TB hard drive? ).

My rule of thumb is to size the partition equal to the amount of RAM in the  
machine.

There's also a school of thought that says that swap partitions are  
generally obsolete, and are no longer needed.

> Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?

1gb for /boot. About 50gb for /. The rest for /home. Most Linux distros fit  
comfortable inside of 50gb, and this will let you switch distros, if you  
ever decide to do so, and keep your data in /home.

> A friend at work suggested multiple hard drives, he said they could be
> set up so that I wouldn't have to dual boot.    Is there any values in
> this?

I find it easier to put another OS into a VM, rather than dual boot. But for  
you, you may be better off dual-booting, since you want to use Netflix in  
Windows. A VM is much more convenient than a dual boot, but there is no  
hardware-accelerated video, which will impact streaming. At least with the  
freely-available libvirt/KVM. I don't know about commercial VMs. They may or  
may not support hardware-accelerated video.

If you decide not to use dual and install only Linux, buy a second hard  
drive, and have the two hard drives in a RAID-1 configuration. This will  
come in handy, when one of them eventually bricks itself.

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#5354

On 2012-05-20, Sam <sam@email-scan.com> wrote:

> There's also a school of thought that says that swap partitions are  
> generally obsolete, and are no longer needed.

No doubt the school that has newer hardware, like a box w/ 2-8G RAM.
My old P4 box has a measly 384M RAM.  I gotta have that swap part,
typically 125% as much swap as RAM.
 
nb

-- 
vi --the heart of evil!
Support labeling GMOs
<http://www.labelgmos.org/>

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#5355

At 20 May 2012 13:46:15 GMT notbob <notbob@nothome.com> wrote:

> 
> On 2012-05-20, Sam <sam@email-scan.com> wrote:
> 
> > There's also a school of thought that says that swap partitions are  
> > generally obsolete, and are no longer needed.
> 
> No doubt the school that has newer hardware, like a box w/ 2-8G RAM.
> My old P4 box has a measly 384M RAM.  I gotta have that swap part,
> typically 125% as much swap as RAM.

Generally 1-2 Gig of swap is plenty.  If you have upwards of 1 gig of
RAM you *can* live without swap.  If you have less, you generally need
*some* swap space.  We have a batch diskless P4 boxes with 1.2G of RAM.
Since swapping over the net would be really bad, these machines don't
have swap (they don't have local disks).  They seem to run well.

>  
> nb
> 

-- 
Robert Heller             -- 978-544-6933 / heller@deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software        -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
()  ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\  www.asciiribbon.org   -- against proprietary attachments


                                                                                      

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#5386 — [OT] Re: Best Hard Drive Set Up For A New Linux Box?

On 05/20/2012 06:31 AM, Sam wrote:
> 
> 1gb for /boot. About 50gb for /.
> 
  What are gram-bits (gb)?

  b = bit
  B = byte
  g = gram
  G = Giga

  The international units are case sensitive.
  See <http://www.poynton.com/notes/units/index.html>

-- 
James Moe
jmm-list at sohnen-moe dot com

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#5389

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

James Moe writes:

> On 05/20/2012 06:31 AM, Sam wrote:
> >
> > 1gb for /boot. About 50gb for /.
> >
>   What are gram-bits (gb)?
>
>   b = bit
>   B = byte
>   g = gram
>   G = Giga
>
>   The international units are case sensitive.
>   See <http://www.poynton.com/notes/units/index.html>

Thank you for the correction, but, unfortunately, I have a life and this  
means that, sometimes, I miss little details, like that.

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#5358

On 20/05/12 14:57, Steve wrote:
> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having Kubuntu
> 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
>
> Shopping around, it seems like 1 TB hard drives are the norm.
>
> I would also like to install a virtual machine on this new PC to run
> Windows for the occasional use where I just can't get something on
> Linux ( for example, streaming Netflix ).    I would also like to be
> able to experiment with the occasional "new" linux distro, without
> jeopardizing my main Kubuntu install or VM set up.
>
> I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
> much on a TB hard drive? ).
>
> Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?
>
> A friend at work suggested multiple hard drives, he said they could be
> set up so that I wouldn't have to dual boot.    Is there any values in
> this?
>
> Thanks much in advance for any tips
>
> Steve

If you want to improve the speed, get 2 hard drives and set them up with 
Linux raid.  Divide each disk into three - 1GB for boots, 1/2 ram size 
for swap, and the rest.  Make a raid1 pair out of the two 1GB partitions 
and use it for /boot.  Use the two swap partitions (with equal 
priorities), and put the rest as a raid10,far2 layout.  You probably 
want that to be a partitionable raid array, so that you can make one 
partition for /, and another for /home (or if you prefer, make it into 
an LVM physical volume - that's what I usually do).

Don't try to get the PC builder to do this - do it yourself.  It is so 
easy these days (assuming you have another PC with internet access to 
"how-tos" during the process) that anyone can do it - except system 
builders.

Don't bother leaving space for "other distros".  Just make sure your 
machine has plenty of ram, and you can run other distros from live CDs.

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#5359

On Sun, 20 May 2012 05:57:02 -0700 (PDT), Steve wrote:
> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having Kubuntu
> 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
>
>
> I would also like to install a virtual machine on this new PC to run
> Windows for the occasional use where I just can't get something on
> Linux ( for example, streaming Netflix ). 

Then I suggest 6 gig, or more, of ram. That way you can give winders 2
gig in the guest and still have lots of ram to keep your system
performing as it should.

>   I would also like to be
> able to experiment with the occasional "new" linux distro, without
> jeopardizing my main Kubuntu install or VM set up.

That I do not understand. Using VirtualBox as a VM example, you create
a new guest disk in the VM, and install whatever distro. The new guest
cannot hurt the other guests unless you setup network or disk sharing
types of connections between guests/OS. 

> I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
> much on a TB hard drive? ).

From your requirements so far, a gig should be plenty. If the system
is going to use hibernation, my misunderstanding is, swap should be
size of ram + 512 bytes.

I have 11 guest in my VM, I use a separate linux account for each
Internet access, browsing, email, usenet,,,,, giving me more than 30
users who have cron jobs running hourly to check for mail and I run
MythTV to watch recorded TV shows.

As you can see I do not use a lot of swap.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3706       2169       1536          0        210       1001
-/+ buffers/cache:        958       2747
Swap:         3812          5       3807


> Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?

I like two drives. Lots of static stuff on drive 2, extra partitions
on drive 1. Space left of both drives for when I need it.

What you do depends on how you manage your system and how easy you
want to make your backups.

For instance. I like a hot backup partition for my "Production" install.
I always do clean installs of the next release and I always test for
bugs in new releases and I like having the old release as a fallback.

Based on a minimum of the above, that would be 5 OS partitions and 1
for swap.
To make easier for backup and sharing across different installs there
are the /accounts and /local partitions.

I find I can use ~40 gig partitions for OS installs. That leaves a lot
of space for growth/usage plus room for a very large package
update. Everything is installed in that partition. /home/$USER has
links to /accounts/$USER for things shared between different OS installs.

I label all my partitions to make it easier to know what is loaded in
what partition. The "Production" partition's boot loader has all the
other OS partitions as selection for booting. Once I have tested the
new release, it becomes the new "Production" partition and the oldest
OS partition becomes the next "New Release" partition.

Since I use dvd for backup, I have DVD sized partition where I create
the iso for backup.

I do not recommend the old school setup of /boot /var/ opt/ /home ...
New release of your desktop manager could change configuration files
in /home/$USER making the desktop manager inoperable on the older/other
same OS install. Same for other OSs.

/var/* can have items that are incompatible between other OS and
different releases of the same OS.

Since you mentioned 1 drive, I would have swap, OS, 4 40 gig
partitions, space, VirtualBox,  dvd, hotbu.

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#5360

Steve wrote:
> I'm thinking of having a new PC custom built and then having Kubuntu
> 12.04 installed on the hard drive.
> 
> Shopping around, it seems like 1 TB hard drives are the norm.
> 
> I would also like to install a virtual machine on this new PC to run
> Windows for the occasional use where I just can't get something on
> Linux ( for example, streaming Netflix ).    I would also like to be
> able to experiment with the occasional "new" linux distro, without
> jeopardizing my main Kubuntu install or VM set up.
> 
> I know I should ask the PC builder to give me a swap partition ( how
> much on a TB hard drive? ).
> 

its not his problem: You set that up yourself when you install Linux.


> Any other advice on how to lay the partitions out?
> 

With a modern distro simply have one enormous partition. By the time you 
realise what you really need in partition terms if anything, the machine 
will be obsolete.

> A friend at work suggested multiple hard drives, he said they could be
> set up so that I wouldn't have to dual boot.    Is there any values in
> this?
> 

Sound like bullshit to me.

> Thanks much in advance for any tips
> 
> Steve

What I advise is putting Linux in one big partition. If you want 
security buy a second bloody great disk and rsync one to the other 
overnight. That will include any or all other virtual machines.

THEN once you have a stable linux system use virtual box to create as 
many sandboxes as you want for windows, other linuxes  etc.

Don't store any data of any importance in windows - always map a virtual 
drive that is your linux data directory (/home/you) into the windows 
setup and keep all important data out of windows. That way when windows 
borks, you can restore to a known good snapshot without losing data.


Only dual boot if the screen speed on virtual box is to crappy for your 
application.

Streaming video may be that one app.

But of you have enough CPU grunt and a decent video card it should be OK

http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_watch_Netflix_%28Watch_Instantly%29_in_Linux

In short get a good linux system working and use that for everything 
except things that wont run without windows, and VM that.  use a proper 
tool if you want like rsysnc to keep a copy of the linux system - or 
whatever parts of it are important to you - on a separate physical 
drive. Or even a separate physical machine!

Only dual boot as a last resort.


-- 
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.

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