drive layout

[bruce]

Hi.

Doing some research into how devs are using their dev systems in terms
of the actual layout/partition of the drives. I've seen plenty of
articles, figured I'd ask here as well.

If you have an interested, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

1) How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?
2) Do you have multiple drives (SSD/Sata)?
3) Is OS on one drive, apps/data on the other?
4) Do you switch between OS(es)?
5) What's your "backup" process/strategy?
6) What's your "update" strategy(ies)?

I'm looking to get a new system
 AMD/ryzen -8core 16G 256G SSD - 1TBSata

I realize that I haven't changed in >10 years, so now is probably a
good time get up to date on a number of things!

thanks for your insights

[Qiyu Yan]

在 2021-04-25星期日的 13:10 -0400，bruce写道：
> How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?

I. An EFI partition which is essential to boot
  II. A Btrfs partition to place / and /home
 III. A seperate disk for multimedia files.
> Do you have multiple drives (SSD/Sata)?

Yes, a NVME ssd for system and home, I want them to be fast when doing
compiling. And a hard drive which is big enough (4 TB) single disk. The
big hard device is used to contain anime/games/music.
> Is OS on one drive, apps/data on the other?

OS and apps and user data on the NVME, media files on hard disk.
> Do you switch between OS(es)?

I don't switch between OSes, I use a seperate laptop to do things that
must be done on Windows, e.g. using meeting software that is Windows
only, or strange docx file that will mess up libreoffice.
> What's your "backup" process/strategy?

A diy NAS, running Fedora Server, with 16 TB of capacity, I dump almost
everything there. But for important files, I will encrypt them and
upload to cloud. And for codes, I will commit them to GitHub.
> What's your "update" strategy(ies)?

If you mean updating system?
Thanks to btrfs, I update by desktop literally whenever I can, if
anything goes wrong, I can rollback. For my nas, I may update within
one week of every fedora release.

Or updating storage?
Buy new disk, plug in, add them to btrfs pool, done. I might be having
OCD that prevents me from deleting things...
> I'm looking to get a new system
>  AMD/ryzen -8core 16G 256G SSD - 1TBSata

With compress of btrfs, it should be just fine to run your system on
256GB SSD, if you don't compile giant things.

About the harddisk, bigger doesn't mean better, just fits your storage
need is enough.

(Don't use SMR hard disk, check that before purchasing, they are slow
and may broke your data.)

[old sixpack13]

> Hi.
>
> Doing some research into how devs are using their dev systems in terms
> of the actual layout/partition of the drives. I've seen plenty of
> articles, figured I'd ask here as well.
>
> If you have an interested, I'd appreciate your thoughts.

no dev here, but ...
> How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?

Fedora drive is a btrfs pool with subvolumes for /, /home, /home/<main user>/DATA
~10 % of the disksize is for overprovisioning and not (!) in the pool
> Do you have multiple drives (SSD/Sata)?

2 ssd's (one F34, second win 8.1)
1 external rotating HD (Backup)
> Is OS on one drive, apps/data on the other?

see 1)
/home/<main user>/DATA was grown as separat, esp. for new installs without need to shovel big data around (just unmount/unplug, (re-)install OS, remount)
> Do you switch between OS(es)?

umh, no, I start Win 8.1 via vbox without special reboot into it. I just staying in Fedora
- boot files generated with:
VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk -filename ./Win_RAW.vmdk -rawdisk /dev/sdX -partitions 1,2 -relative
- then vbox pointing to that files/disk
> What's your "backup" process/strategy?

- weekly rsync to an external rotating HD of /boot, /etc, /home, /lib/modules, /root, /var/www, /var/lib/radical
> What's your "update" strategy(ies)?

I'm not clear what you mean here, but I mostly follow what Fedora/Kernel people "throw into internet"
> I'm looking to get a new system
>  AMD/ryzen -8core 16G 256G SSD - 1TBSata

get a 500 GB SSD:
- often higher TBW
- often faster then 256
- to get ~10 % of the unused disk size for "overprovisioning" into your account
> I realize that I haven't changed in >10 years, so now is probably a
> good time get up to date on a number of things!
>
> thanks for your insights

[old sixpack13]

> Fedora drive is a btrfs pool with subvolumes for /, /home, /home/<main
> user>/DATA

I forgot:
- /boot as ext4 (1-2 GB)
- no EFI

[Richard Shaw]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 12:10 PM bruce  wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Doing some research into how devs are using their dev systems in terms
> of the actual layout/partition of the drives. I've seen plenty of
> articles, figured I'd ask here as well.
>
> If you have an interested, I'd appreciate your thoughts.
> How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?

SSDs are getting cheaper, but not cheap enough for mass storage for me so
currently:
500GB M.2 NVMe boot/system drive
* /boot
* /boot/efi
* / and /var subvolumes sharing remaining space
* /home 3TB spinning disk

I like having /var as a separate volume because when it was EXT4 I could do
a reinstall and format / without losing data in /var. I setup using
subvolumes this time before I realized that was no longer possible. I guess
it could make snapshots easier though...

2) Do you have multiple drives (SSD/Sata)?
>

Yup
> Is OS on one drive, apps/data on the other?

Hybrid depending on what you consider data, but /home definitely.
> Do you switch between OS(es)?

Not on my desktop. If I need windows I run it in Gnome Boxes, I do dual
boot my laptop.
> What's your "backup" process/strategy?

I use BackupPC (I also maintain the package) to backup /home and /etc on
most of the computers in the house. I have it on a CentOS 8 Stream box in
the closet w/ UPS.
> What's your "update" strategy(ies)?

I haven't had many issues upgrading over the last several releases but now
that I'm on btrfs I could take a snapshot, upgrade, and if there's a major
problem revert back to the snapshot.
> I'm looking to get a new system
>  AMD/ryzen -8core 16G 256G SSD - 1TBSata

That should work fine but depending on your budget, 500GB SSDs seem to be
the sweet spot if you're going with a hybrid SSD/spinning disk combo. For
laptops I just usually opt for a 1TB SSD.

Thanks,
Richard

[Tim]

On Wed, 2021-04-28 at 07:40 -0500, Richard Shaw wrote:
> I like having /var as a separate volume because when it was EXT4 I
> could do a reinstall and format / without losing data in /var. I
> setup using subvolumes this time before I realized that was no longer
> possible. I guess it could make snapshots easier though...

It was supposedly still possible, but difficult, to have /var as a
separate drive/partition/etc (it needed to be mounted very early during
the boot process, was my recollection).

Possibly the simplest workaround was to not separate var from /, but
put *some* of your data subdirectories elsewhere, and mount them into
/var.  e.g. /var/www could be on a separate drive.  It's usually not
needed while booting up, so it shouldn't matter if it's mounted a bit
later.

Traditionally, having /var separate was done for a couple of reasons;
it could be put on a faster drive/partition, and its ever-changing data
can thrash the drive harder than other partitions.  With SDDs having
wear-out problems, some of those traditional reasons have returned.

[Chris Murphy]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2021 at 6:40 AM Richard Shaw  wrote:
> > How is your drive/system laid out regarding your paritions?
>
> SSDs are getting cheaper, but not cheap enough for mass storage for me so currently:
> 500GB M.2 NVMe boot/system drive
> /boot
> /boot/efi
> / and /var subvolumes sharing remaining space
> /home 3TB spinning disk
>
> I like having /var as a separate volume because when it was EXT4 I could do a reinstall and format / without losing data in /var. I setup using subvolumes this time before I realized that was no longer possible. I guess it could make snapshots easier though...

The installer definitely let's you reuse an existing subvolume for the
/home mount point (unless it's a snapshot [1]). I'm not certain about
reusing a subvolume or snapshot for /var because it contains the RPM
database which is inextricably linked to most everything in '/' except
for /home. There isn't a very elegant way of dealing with this in the
general case, let alone the specifics of snapshotting and rollbacks.

The installer will not let you reuse a file system for '/' however.
There is an exception for Btrfs, which is it'll reuse an existing
Btrfs, but it requires a new subvolume (created by the installer) for
'/' mount point. That way it's possible to do a clean install while
reusing a subvolume for /home.

[1]
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1885102