Out of Space

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Sat, 6 Aug 2016 20:01:21 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
>/dev/sda1 ... /boot ... 2GB

I would add /boot to / and don't give it its own partition, so required
space is automatically allocated, if needed.

>/dev/sda2 ... extended... all remaining space
>/dev/sda5 ... /home ... *inside* /dev/sda2 ... all remaining space

I don't use a separated /home partition either, but nothing is speaking
against giving /home it's own partition. Some people consider that
having /home on its own partition, as being an advantage, so this is ok.

_But_ just formatting one primary partition is a bad habit, since some
operating systems, e.g. FreeBSD require a primary partition and you
never know, if you one day might want to test such an operating system.

So format your drives like this

/dev/sda1 primary
/dev/sda2 primary
/dev/sda3 primary
/dev/sda4 extended
/dev/sda5
/dev/sdan

/dev/sdb1 primary
/dev/sdb2 primary
/dev/sdb3 primary
/dev/sdb4 extended
/dev/sdb5
/dev/sdan

n is for as much partitions you like. However, don't make the
partitions to small. Format all partitions to ext4, but format one
partition on each HDD as a Linux swap. While all ext4 partitions should
be around <= 20 to >= 60 GiB (sure, it depends on the size of your
HDDs ;), so you might not want to have that much partitions), the two
swaps should be as large as the RAM of your computer, to be able to
suspend to disk,without the need to care about the compression.

IOW each HDD should have it's own swap and assuming you've enough
space, three primary partitions.
Use one large partition for /, including /boot, don't split it.

Use another large partition for /home, but also consider to have a
partition for special data, e.g. videos, documents, virtual machines
etc. (IMO you not necessarily need a separated /home).

For performance reasons it could be an advantage to have /home and data
partitions on one HDD and / on the other. You also could make
"backups" (quotation marks, because a backup should be made on an
external drive) in the future from sda to sdb and from sdb to sda, so
assumed one drive should fail, the other drive still contains its
content.

2 Cents,
Ralf