*BSD News Article 81833


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: SCSI help
Date: 27 Oct 1996 15:09:47 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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References: <1996Oct26.150550.3068@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
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Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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tedm@agora.rdrop.com wrote:

> One thing I would like to ask the developers, is there a difference
> between splitting a disk up between multiple slices, or a single
> slice?  For example,

Not much of a difference.  These are basically two different
approaches for the same thing.  One of them is historically grown in
the Unix environment, where it's been normal that the operating system
owned the entire disk.  FreeBSD calls it `partitions', following the
Unix tradition.  `slices' are the fdisk partitions that grew in the PC
environment.

> a friend of mine told me that Unixes run better when the filesystem
> is spread over a, d, e f, partitions, when the partitions are kept
> under 200MB.

There should be no notable difference.  Your root partition (`a'
normally) must reside below what the BIOS believes were 1024 cylinders
so the /kernel file is accessible by the BIOS.  That's about the only
restriction.

Quite to the contrary, the ccd driver is doing just the opposite.
It's mostly a matter of your needs and your policy whether to create
many partitions or crunch everything into a few of them only.

Note that these matters are _entirely_ different for people using
braindead FAT filesystems.  The FAT mechanism simply sucks rocks if
the allocation block size (`clusters') get larger due to a large
partition size.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)