What to do with free space partition.

[worstdayever]

When I first installed mint on my macbook a few years ago I read that when partitioning, I should leave the free space as an unallocated partition and take from it when my /home runs low. Does this still hold true in any way?

[Larry78723]

Please post the following reports. This will give us a concise overview of your hardware and on how Mint sees it.

Here is how to generate the reports and post them:

Open a terminal window. Make it fullscreen to avoid unneeded linebreaks or chopped lines. Execute the command

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lsblk 

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blkid

exactly as they have been typed here.

Mark the complete text output which each command will display with your mouse.
Press the keyboard shortcut <Shift><Ctrl>C to copy the marked text into the clipboard.
Enclose the results between the code markers by selecting </> from the mini toolbar above the textbox where you type your reply then paste <Ctrl>V them in your reply between the code markers.

The results will help us to help you.

Larry

[gm10]

When I first installed mint on my macbook a few years ago I read that when partitioning, I should leave the free space as an unallocated partition and take from it when my /home runs low. Does this still hold true in any way?

Was never true. Why leave unallocated space? Use it, that's why you got it...

[worstdayever]

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NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 233.8G  0 disk 
├─sda1   8:1    0   190M  0 part /boot/efi
├─sda2   8:2    0  18.6G  0 part /
├─sda3   8:3    0   5.6G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda4   8:4    0    28G  0 part /home

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/dev/sda1: UUID="3DC8-B477" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="7f55c8df-46b3-4ffb-88a8-bed6ff1b7954"
/dev/sda2: UUID="f6d736bd-e078-4678-8997-6b320f256f4f" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="038467b7-cd45-4f20-9c33-7ba6a60d9b9e"
/dev/sda3: UUID="ff787998-cdcd-410a-ab8f-9defb01947c4" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="6b18feb6-08f0-47fa-b664-da3d2dd834ed"
/dev/sda4: UUID="0abbd6d9-0089-45f8-b77a-5f0edc8f2b28" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="cd95d7bc-16b6-4441-b6b0-26bec7cc24a3"

I think the idea was security based. Keeping all data to smaller partitions that can be deleted/secured easier than if data was spread across the drive.

[catweazel]

I think the idea was security based. Keeping all data to smaller partitions that can be deleted/secured easier than if data was spread across the drive.

If the data is in one or multiple partitions, it's still spread across the drive. The only reason to reserve empty space at the the and of a hard disk is drive for sophisticated HDD controllers that use the space for spare blocks; this is called over-provisioning and isn't seen on regular PCs with HDDs. For SSDs, it's different. SSDs nowadays do support over-provisioning and it is recommended to keep a few GB empty at the end of of a SSD.

Other than for aligning partitions on a drive (either SSD or HDD), there is absolutely no other sane reason to leave empty space at the end of the drive to keep extending a partition as its usage grows. In fact, it's counter-productive because every extension increases the risk of lost data.

[MontyMan]

While transitioning from the Windows world to Linux, I partitioned the HDD with some free space in between the Linux partition and the Windows one, so I could add space to whichever one filled up first.