32. Appendix L: Example VI: Single Drive System

Although this falls somewhat outside the scope of this HOWTO it cannot be denied that recently some rather large drives have become very affordable. Drives with 100 - 250 GB are becoming common and the question often is how best to partition such monsters. Interestingly enough very few seem to have any problems in filling up such drives and the future looks generally quite rosy for manufacturers planning on even bigger drives.

Opportunities for optimisations are of course even smaller than for 2 drive systems but some tricks can still be used to optimise track positions while minimising head movements.

Partition       hda             Size estimate (MB)
                ----            ------------------
         1      DOS             500
         2      boot            20
         3      Winswap         200
         4      data            The bulk of the drive
         5      lib             50 - 500
         6      news            300+
         7      swap            128     (Maximum size for 32-bit CPU)
         8      tmp             300+    (/tmp and /var/tmp)
         9      /usr            50 - 500
        10      /home           300+
        11      /var            50 - 300
        12      mail            300+
        13      / (root)        30
        14      dosdata         10      ( Windows bug workaround!)

Remember that the dosdata partition is a DOS filesystem that must be the very last partition on the drive, otherwise Windows gets confused.