Introduction
Everybody’s got an opinion, and I’m no different. After reading Trent’s piece yesterday, I thought I’d add my two cents as my partitioning scheme is quite complex (though I can think of several ways to make it worse). For newbies, some of this is unlikely something to try, but you might want to read anyway to get an idea of what can be done.
For starters, I have 1GB of physical RAM, and 4GB of swap space split over two drives. I have two 120GB drives that I use for my primary system that are split into 8 partitions (and a logical ninth). Most of these partitions mirror (RAID-1) each other so that if one drive fails, the other maintains the system until I can replace it. You may note that the swaps are not mirrored, but both swaps and the md08 array are encrypted. Like Trent, I intended a dual boot with Windows, so the first partition on sda is NTFS. (Of course, I haven’t actually had a Windows OS on that partition in about two years, but it’s nice to know I have it if I find a game that won’t play nice in Wine.) Also note that /boot is a mirrored partition, which keeps the data safe, but upon bootup the boot loader (LILO/GRUB) accesses only one of the two drives (i.e., sda3, not md3).