Putting /home
on a separate partition is fairly common. That typically splits system files (/
) and user files (/home
). The two filesystems may have different performance trade-offs, different backup policies, different quotas, different security policies, etc. Also this way the OS can be reinstalled or reimaged independently of the user data. Splitting /home
is a good idea both for single-user workstations and for multi-user systems that store user files. I'd only keep /home
on the same partition on a server that has no user files beyond the administrators' configuration files (but there might be a separate partition for whatever that machine is about — /var/mail
, or a database, etc.), or on a quick-and-simple installation especially on a laptop which isn't going to be rebalanced to use a second disk.
Putting /usr
on a separate partition used to be common, back when the OS used a large amount of disk space (say, 300MB out of 1GB). This partition could be made read-only, might be shared over the network. Making /usr
read-only had the advantage that in case of a power loss, it wouldn't need an fsck. Nowadays all major filesystems use a journal and don't require any lengthy fsck, and disk sizes have increased a lot more than OS sizes — 30GB out of 1TB is peanuts, so it doesn't need to be shared. There is no good reason to split /usr
from the rest of the system (/bin
, /etc
, /var
, …). If you see advice to split /usr
, it's grossly obsolete.
/usr
read-only, or make it an NFS share across multiple installations. – jordanm Jul 29 '13 at 02:58