For new users, personal Debian boxes, home systems, and othersingle-user setups, a single
/
partition (plusswap) is probably the easiest, simplest way to go. However, if yourpartition is larger than around 6GB, choose ext3 as your partitiontype. Ext2 partitions need periodic file system integrity checking,and this can cause delays during booting when the partition is large.![Mac partition type Mac partition type](/uploads/1/2/2/8/122816292/703913955.png)
For multi-user systems or systems with lots of disk space, it's bestto put
/var
,/tmp
, and /home
each ontheir own partitions separate from the /
partition.You might need a separate
/usr/local
partition ifyou plan to install many programs that are not part of the Debiandistribution. If your machine will be a mail server, you might needto make /var/mail
a separate partition. Often,putting /tmp
on its own partition, for instance20–50MB, is a good idea. If you are setting up a server with lotsof user accounts, it's generally good to have a separate, large/home
partition. In general, the partitioningsituation varies from computer to computer depending on its uses.Each partition will take up a portion of your usable storage. So, if you are running low on storage capacity on your hard drive, we don't recommend partitioning. If you are running a Mac using HFS+ file system (prior to macOS Catalina) you must partition your hard drive. If your Mac uses APFS, Apple recommends creating a volume instead.
For very complex systems, you should see theMulti Disk HOWTO. This contains in-depth information, mostlyof interest to ISPs and people setting up servers.
- Ext2 partitions need periodic file system integrity checking, and this can cause delays during booting when the partition is large. For multi-user systems or systems with lots of disk space, it's best to put /var, /tmp, and /home each on their own partitions separate from the / partition.
- Disk Utility is the perfect choice for creating a partition of your Mac’s hard drive.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/2/8/122816292/664964277.png)
With respect to the issue of swap partition size, there are manyviews. One rule of thumb which works well is to use as much swap asyou have system memory. It also shouldn't be smaller than 16MB, inmost cases. Of course, there are exceptions to these rules. If youare trying to solve 10000 simultaneous equations on a machine with256MB of memory, you may need a gigabyte (or more) of swap.
On some 32-bit architectures (m68k and PowerPC), themaximum size of a swap partition is 2GB. That should be enough fornearly any installation. However, if your swap requirements are thishigh, you should probably try to spread the swap across differentdisks (also called “spindles”) and, if possible, different SCSI orIDE channels. The kernel will balance swap usage between multipleswap partitions, giving better performance.
As an example, an older home machine might have 32MB of RAM and a1.7GB IDE drive on
/dev/sda
. There might be a500MB partition for another operating system on/dev/sda1
, a 32MB swap partition on/dev/sda3
and about 1.2GB on/dev/sda2
as the Linux partition.Best Mac Scheme Partition List
For an idea of the space taken by tasksyou might be interested in adding after your system installation iscomplete, check Section D.2, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks”.