[mythtv-users] Suggestions for a partition structure

[R. G. Newbury]

On 10/21/2013 04:33 PM, Eric Sharkey wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 21, 2013 at 3:05 PM, R. G. Newbury <newbury at mandamus.org> wrote:
>> Given how prices have come down you might also consider getting a third
>> small drive (40 - 60G possibly an SSD) and using that for the OS.
>
> Definitely.  For ~$80 you can get a 120GB SSD these days.  Not a
> screaming fast SSD, but it'll beat the pants of any traditional HD for
> random I/O.
>
>> For video, xfs seems to be the correct choicel It handles very large files
>> better than anything else,
>
> For most mythtv systems, the choice of filesystem isn't likely to be a
> significant factor in actual perceived performance.

2 aspects are involved. The usual chunk of space allocated on a hard 
drive is 4 or 8k. xfs lets you allocate large contiguous chunks of disk 
space which reduces head movement. Secondly, xfs is really fast at 
deleting files.
ext4 is way slow at deleting large files.


>> As to partitioning, I have partitions for '/', /home, /usr/local, and /var.
>
> My approach is to have the absolute minimum number of partitions.  I
> usually just have /, /boot (tiny), and swap.  I would get an SSD and
> set these up on there,

THAT is a recipe for disaster. If you have one process go run-away and 
spam-fill your /var/log/messages or /var/lib/mysql logging folders you 
will NOT be able to recover. And as RW pointed out, that will also 
destroy your mysql database(s). I'm not  even sure that there is any way 
to recover from that sort of run-away without a complete re-install. All 
for 'an absolute minimum of partitions'.


>then make a /u/mythtv1 and /u/mythtv2, mount
> the 500GB drives there, and set them up in a storage group.

You don't actually need to set up a 'storage group' a-la-a LVM. Myth 
will be quite happy to use them as mount points, and balance the usage.

Geoff