I've seen a number of posts on this topic, but would still like more opinions.

I have a second disk that has primarily been used for backups, music, and users' files on my windows server. These are available on the network to the properly permissioned users. I'm moving the entire server over to fedora, and will need to make this info available in much the same way. I'm reformatting this drive from ntfs to ext3.

When I perform the install, what directory is a good candidate for the second disk? Should I create a new directory? I have seen that many users do not move the home directory to other drives, but why not? Does it not make sense to have this data on a seperate physical drive? If I were to reformat the first disk, this data shouldn't need to be overwritten.

Any opinions?

This is really your call. You can move the /home to another partition (if you like) to the 2nd disk if you want. At my company, everyone's home directory is actually nfs mounted from a filer. You probably don't see many people putting their /home to a different drive because they probably don't need to.

I don't know how your setup is really like and what you want to do with it but you can do this as a suggestion:

[2nd hard drive]
1. Create 3 partitions.
2. Give /home to hdb1
3. Give /music to hdb2
4. Give /backup to hdb3

Something like that could work. Again, you have many routes with this setup.

-twantrd

Are you asking where should you mount your second hard drive? I mount mine at /mnt/hdb. It's completely up to you. I like everything in my filesystem organzied, so everything I mount, I mount in /mnt; a usb drive, a secon hard drive, or even network shared folders. It makes everything easier when it's all in one place.

This is almost exactly how I have it using windows. The "home" partition on my windows file server is mapped on the clients to "My Documents". This is the type of setup I was thinking of going to. I'm happy to see that someone else is doing it this way. Thanks for the input!

Not so much. I'm pretty sure I'll be mounting various directories in the same manner that you have been. I'm really looking for what other people think of moving dirs to seperate physical disks. I thought about moving opt, but a reformat of the system disk would make the programs here unusable anyway. So I got to wondering abou twhat a good file system layout would be for a system that primarily hosts files and maybe a local httpd.

Thanks for the input!