If you have a Linux server with only 1 physical hard disk you may be tempted to simply create a single partition for your entire system. This is a simple way to set things up.
However using multiple partitions on your 1 physical drive does have one primary advantage. Suppose you place /tmp on a seperate 2GB partition. Now if some user writes a file to /tmp that is very large (say near 2GB) then they will fill up that partition but not the rest of your system's drive. This reduces the chance that the machine will hang because some user filled up all your disk space.
One disadvantage is that multiple seperate partitions on a single disk means that the disk head has to move further distances when going across partitions. However if performance is an issue you should consider multiple physical hard disk drives anyway.
This is the strategy I recommend:
| Partition Order | Mount Point | Disk Utilization |
|---|
| 1 | SWAP | 50% Size of Physical RAM |
| 2 | /tmp | 10% |
| 3 | /var | 20% |
| 4 | /home | 30% |
| 5 | / | 40% - SWAP size |