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I have a dedicated box whose specs are:

CPU: 4-core Xeon 3450 *1 (HT enabled)
RAM: 8GB DDR3
HDD: 15k SAS 147G *2 (currently in RAID 1)

The current OS is Windows Server 2003. I am running a web server (with a couple of websites), a mail server, a svn server (based on apache), and quite a few game servers on it. I'm now planning to switch the OS to ubuntu server and break the RAID to double the storage space. What partition scheme do you recommend to make the most out of the dual HDD setup?

Jermin Hu
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2 Answers2

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I recently wrote a long answer on why you'd want partitions in the first place here.

In short:

  • use LVM and not native partitions.
  • two LVM partitions (one for swap and the second with a root file system containing everything) is not necessarily bad.
  • more partitions can be beneficial, but if you do, start with minimally sized ones and leave space unassigned so you can allocate more to the right partition(s)

LVM allows you to grow partitions and their file-systems and if you buy additional disks in the future you can you can add that capacity to an existing LVM volume group, allow you to grow partitions online, without moving data.

Sacrificing redundancy for capacity may bite you in the ass.

Community
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HBruijn
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First off, I recommend not breaking the RAID. The performance and reliability gains of RAID-1 over 2 independent disks are worth it.

If you're not particularly well-versed in Linux, the default partition scheme that Ubuntu suggests is generally fine. If you have other needs, then here's a good starting point. Adjust as necessary, for example if you have a specific application that will take up 40GB in /opt.

/ - 50GB - ext4 file system
SWAP - 16GB - swap file system
/var - 10GB - ext4 file system
/home - remaining space - ext4 file system
Hyppy
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