Lets say, on a 200 GB hard drive...and you wanted to fit as many files as possible onto one partiton. What is the largest partition size you all would recommend for an ext3 or reiserfs partition? I'd always learned that it was better to have smaller partition sizes to increase performance/efficiency, but that mostly dealt with Windows. Is it sensible to have much larger partitions on Linux file systems?

I use partition placement as an efficiency tool. Place the busiest partition in the middle of a disk and the least used partitions at the front and back of the disk. I have three disks and locate partitions across the disks to try to balance I/O among the disks. So I try to end up with my three busiest partitions in the middle of their respective drive.

I have never thought of using partition size as an efficiency tool. I too am interested in the answer as to how partition size affects efficiency.

Just gave it a try earlier today. I made an 80 GB ReiserFS partition and started copying a few movies onto it. It seemed to be going unbearably slow, so I stopped the transfer. After waiting 5 seconds for 'ls' to bring up a directory listing I decided maybe it wasn't such a great thing......which sucks. I've got everything alphabetized and right now it's split up over 5 40 GB partitions. Needless to say the wasted space in less populated partitions is extremely inefficient.

Has ANYONE at all here ever tried doing this? Anyone been successful?

thanks