Thinking of installing Ubuntu (or any other distro) and praying to, maybe a Linux god?, for answers on how to partition your hard disk? I once faced a similar task, though I didn’t pray to any god, I did some research online and found great tips on how best to partition.
Although I understood the English on these many webpages I visited, they hardly tickled me as I wanted to play safe. Know too, that it was my first time custom partitioning, thus I didn’t want a situation where I had to stretch-resize partitions after installation.
Today, if I wish to start from scratch, to bring my PC up to speed at where I am currently, it takes a lot of downloads. With my web apps, I can just call a requirements.txt file to grab all the necessary packages and dependencies. Similar to packages from managers like Bower and NPM.
The biggest issue has to deal with the download. The last time I lost everything on my hard disk, I could count somewhere 750 Gig of data gone down the sink. Although I did not need every bit of that chunk of data, I still needed some important ones, including Skype.
haha, the Skype part was a joke!
Enough!
My point is, I was not willing to sacrifice any more time in tweaking my system partitions after installation, so I went for the ‘booze’ ( in other words, Over-the-top ) partition sizes. I don’t regret setting such crazy sizes. At least, I’ve not used more than 60% of my available hard disk capacity, so no sweat. Plus, I’m in no need of space anytime soon.
However, for future partitionings, I resolve to stick by these, especially considering my ‘eying’ of a 250 Gig SSD. With the eying part, I mean, I wish to grab a 250 Gig SSD soon. The partitioning I list below will eventually be how I partition my hard disk.
*Partitions, Baby!*
If you don’t want to complicate things, and just want what’s baked into Ubuntu with regards to partitions, you can select the option which allows Ubuntu to handle all the partitioning for you. Although that sounds awesome, doesn’t really impress everyone, ( including Moi ).
Below is the current state of (intense) use of my system and how much each partition has been eaten with time.
If you have a terabyte or more of storage capacity, you can ignore the senselessness of my partitions below, and maybe copy that foolish set up of mine. However, I beg you, DON’T. That partition of mine wasn’t the best.
This is the Best
From my personal usage, below partitions are ideal, and should work even under extreme conditions (my extreme conditions)
|
Directory ( Partition Name ) |
Total in Megabytes ( Gig ) |
|
/ ( Root ) |
2,500 ( 25 ) |
|
/boot ( Boot ) |
250 ( 0.25 ) |
|
/boot/efi ( Boot EFI ) [some systems might not need this ] |
20 ( 0.02 ) |
|
/home ( Home ) |
20,000+ ( 200+ ) |
Conclusion
That’s it! How do you partition yours? Do you even bother custom-partitioning during installation? I’ll like to know in the comments.
