Best way to Partition new 2TB Hard Drive

[rekabe]

Hello All,

I presently have a KDE desktop install on a 320GB hard drive with my home partition of 220GB almost completely filled. The bulk of the /home is filled with media files , so that's why I bought the 2TB to use as a second drive for media files and maybe mythtv recordings and testing.
I am wondering what would be the best way to partition the new 2TB drive.

[rubentje1991]

Question: You'll keep the 320GB hard drive also in your system (this means, two HDs?)

[DeBaas]

Partition the drive with gParted (Synaptic),
Start it with -- kdesu gparted -- to avoid problems.
On a fresh empty HDD gParted will choose the right settings for large HDD (4k) alignement.

[rekabe]

Yes I plan on using the 320GB as my primary drive and the 2TB for storage and backup.Yes it will be a two drive setup
I know the tools to use such as Gparted but I was just wondering what would be the best partition scheme for such a system.

[rubentje1991]

Personally, I'd do +/- following:

Root (main): 20GB
SWAP: 2x RAM (for example 10GB to have an easy example now)
Home (main): 200GB
Rest of the room (in this case 90GB), I personally would use to install other test-installations for PCLinuxOS, or even to try another distro once in a while (hey, that's long ago that I tried that)....

Some people prefer to put those testing installs on the 2nd HD - but doesn't matter very much I think (only when your first HD fails, it's maybe possible to boot then from 2nd HD if you configure it right  ).

2nd HD:
Repo: 80-100GB; this will contain a full copy (synchronized) of the PCLinuxOS repositories (packaging, development, testing, ....) and other things (LibreOffice packages, some scripts, ....)
Document/Data: all the rest

Some people like to have a separate partition for e.g. video / photo / backup / recordings / ..... - that's your own choice


So, now you know how I'd partition that bunch of free room
=> I see you primarly wanted it to contain media files, there you go.....; but I also would take a backup of my home directory (first drive) on my 2nd drive sometimes (and then normally also sometimes backup of the 2nd drive to external drive / .... so that the chance on data loss is much lower)  
More questions are always welcome  

[Just17]

I would make a couple of very large partitions.
I would then link my directories from /home to one of the partitions.

So directories such as Videos, Music etc would be linked to the actual storage space on the new drive.

After doing this, the actual /home partition can be quite small.

[rubentje1991]

I would make a couple of very large partitions.
I would then link my directories from /home to one of the partitions.

So directories such as Videos, Music etc would be linked to the actual storage space on the new drive.

After doing this, the actual /home partition can be quite small.

Only config files, cache, temporary files, maybe downloads (to distribute later to right folders)...
=> for only the first items, you already need some GBs, but 200GB isn't needed (15GB is enough for example, and then you can put the repo partition on the first HD too)
=> I only have the habit of putting virtual machines in home folder.... so that's why I regularly have a larger home folder..... 

[rekabe]

I like Rubentje1991 suggestion and I think I will try it. I however plan on installing PCLinuxOS 64 bit distro when it's released on this machine. Will I have to reformat the 2TB second drive with my media and other data?

[rubentje1991]

No, if it doesn't contain the home directory, you can leave as is...
=> on install you just set a mount point to the partition in advanced partitioning (and do not format it at that moment) and ready you are (all the rest happens automatically)!

[dixonpete]

I have 3 drives in my main system. The first drive had default partitioning except I made my root a little bigger since it's a pain to run out of space when you want to add new programs.

The two other drives I just left with one central partition. Didn't see the need for dividing them. Works well.