Why use multiple partitions on a rhel server?

Posted by Jakobud on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jakobud
Published on 2011-02-04T17:18:54Z Indexed on 2011/02/05 7:27 UTC
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raid

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rhel5

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partitioning

I'm about to reformat and reinstall CentOS onto an old server. The server runs on a modest 30 node small business network and has a variety of responsibilities including MySQL, a Samba share, DHCPd & SVN/Trac.

The old sysadmin had this server setup with almost a dozen different partitions for various things. I'm trying to understand what the advantages of multiple partitions are as opposed to a just one filesystem at /. Speed? Flexibility? Security?

It seems like if you misjudge the necessary size for any given partition and it ends up filling up too fast, it requires a sysadmin to go in and expand the partition, etc... Seems like it would be easier if everything was just one flat / filesystem. But I'm sure there are some advantages I'm not aware of.

The server is currently running a handful of HDDs raided to ~2TB (raid 0).

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