== Do we want to standardize the size of our root filesystems on servers? We install many of our Linux servers with mirrored system disks, and at the moment our standard partitioning is to have a 1 GB swap partition and then give the rest of the space to the root filesystem. In light of [[the complexity of shrinking even a RAID-1 swap partition ShrinkingSoftwareRAIDSwap]], whose contents I could casually destroy, an obvious question came to me: did we want to switch to having our root filesystems normally being a standard size, say 80 GB, with the rest of the disk space left unused? The argument for doing this is that it makes replacing dead system disks much less of a hassle than it is today, because almost any SATA disk we have lying around would do. Today, if a system disk breaks we need to find a disk of the same size or larger to replace it with, and we may not have a same-sized disk ([[we recycle random disks a lot ../sysadmin/HardToTellFailureCausesApart]]), so we may wind up with weird mismatched disks with odd partitioning. An 80 GB root filesystem is good enough for basically any of our Linux servers; even with lots of packages and so on installed, they just don't need much space (we don't seem to have any that are using over about 45 GB of space, and that's including a bunch of saved syslog logs and so on). The main argument against doing this is that this hasn't been a problem so far and there are some potential uses for having lots of spare space in the root filesystem. I admit that this may not sound too persuasive now that I write it down, but honestly 'this is not a real problem for us' is a valid argument. If we were going to pick a standard root filesystem size we'd have to figure out what it should be, monitor the growth of our as-installed root filesystems over time (and over new Ubuntu versions), maybe reconsider the size every so often, and so on. We'd probably want to actually calculate what minimum disk size we're going to get in the future and set the root filesystem size based on that, which implies doing some research and discussion. All of this adds up to kind of a hassle (and having people spend time on this does cost money, [[at least theoretically ../tech/UniversitiesSunkStaff]]). Given that it's not impossible to shrink an extN filesystem if we have to and that we usually default to using the smallest size of disks in our collection for new system disks, leaving our practices as they are is both pretty safe and what I expect we'll do. (We also seem to only rarely lose (mirrored) system disks, even when they're relatively old disks. That may change in the future, or maybe not as we theoretically migrate to SSDs for system disks. Our practical migration is, well, not that far along, for reasons beyond the scope of this entry.)