Brand New Setup, Need Advice

How should I partition all this space?

[JohnSka7]

Just got a new webserver at work and I'm in the process of partitioning my 900gb drive and I'm stuck on the idea of striping. I know that this is a raid 5 system, but I'm looking for some advice for this part...I know about partitioning drives, but don't have much experience with raids, and trying to read up on it online has yielded a lot of technical data, but not much in the way of "Do this for this setup, that for that setup".

Any pointers would be really appreciated.

Oh, the webserver is for a k-12 school system and serves primarily web pages and a medium amount of database content with some streaming video (not a huge demand, but will possibly grow in the future)

[wheel]

The reason you want to partition drives is so that if one fills up, it doesn't screw over another partition. So base your partitions to seperate directories that should be discrete, then give them as much space as you need.

Most of the directories are not going to take up that much space, so your 900gigs is going to be enormous.

I'd probably do something like allocate 5 to 10 gigs to a partition each for /usr, /var, /etc. Then throw the bulk of the space into a partition for /home (for your users). So if someone goes nuts and eats up your home directory space, it won't shut your server down because /var has no more room.

[wheel]

Oh, BTW, I use mandriva for my servers and desktop. And mandriva during install has three partition options, simple, manual, and server (which allocates much as I've described above). I go with server to let it allocate the basic structure, then tweak the size of the partitions a bit after that.