[Novices] Hard Drive Partitioning

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> In Linux, I don't think the partitions are so critical because Linux
> doesn't use drive letters.  I suspect the only reason swap still has its
> own partition is to make sure swap space never gets mixed with normal
> data in any way, shape or form.  I'll bow to our resident gurus if they
> have a better explanation.

Performance,  swapping to a file adds filesystem allocation and
fragmentation overhead;  and if your swapping you already have a
performance problem.