Partition

A region on a physical disk.

Partitions on the same disk can have different file systems.

It is often recommended to have a /boot, /swap, /home and / partition. A separate /home parition is used so that if something goes wrong and begins to fill up /home, your system will still boot.

The /swap partition holds data when RAM is full. When the machine hibernates (nb: not the same as sleep), the contents of RAM are copied to /swap on disk. Note that sleep takes a small amount of energy to run, but hibernate does not. It is generally recommended that swap be twice the RAM size.

The partitioning scheme is stored in the partition table. For instance in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface systems, information about where partitions begin and end, and which are bootable, are stored in a GUID Partition Table (GPT).

In older systems, the partition table is stored in the Master Boot Record (MBR), which is a region at the beginning of the disk (see Boot Process).