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[Nils Kassube]

Steven Vollom wrote:
> It gets very difficult some times, especially when two of the people
> I respect most on the list are of opposite belief.  I like you both
> so much, that when I have to make the final decision, I won't be able
> to say, or the other will think I respect him more.

As always when there are conflicting opinions you will have to decide 
which side you prefer. I don't think you would hurt anyone's feelings 
with your decision, what ever it is. After all, it is your computer and 
you have to live with the result.

> A curiosity for my own understanding though.  Is there a limit to how
> many logical partitions can be located within an Extended partition?

Yes, for Linux there is a limit. According to [1] it is 15 for SCSI and 
63 for IDE disks. The document seems to be a bit dated because there is 
no mention of SATA disks.

> I have sufficient media in my artwork to want to separate them by
> partitions rather than just folders.

I would suggest you use folders even if it makes more sense for you to 
use partitions. If you use separate partitions for individual 
categories, you will have a lot of wasted space on one partition while 
another partition is filled up. I'll try to explain: Let's say you want 
to make two partitions for music and videos. The average size of your 
video files is 5 times as big as your music files. Therefore you decide 
to make a 10GB partition for music and a 50GB partition for videos. 
After a while you find out that you have no more space left on your 
music partition while there is plenty of space on your video partition. 
Now what can you do? You can resize both partitions with the risk of 
data loss (and it is very time consuming) or you can backup all those 
data and create new partitions with appropriate size and restore the 
data from the backup. However, what seems to be the appropriate size 
then may be wrong again and you will hit another size limit some time 
later.

If you use folders instead, you can write data to the disk until you 
reach the size limit of the entire disk, not the limit of individual 
partitions.


Nils

[1] <http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/partition-types.html#logical>