I'm planning a clean install of my MacBook Pro with OS X 10.6 and I want to make a partition (among others) only for the sleepimage file.
Here's the problem: the partition's size.
I know that this file is exactly the same of my RAM amount: 4 GB.
However the Finder's "Show information" panel says that it's arount 4.3 GB! Which one do I have to trust to?
And if it isn't enough, I know that each partition retains a 10% of its size (even if it's tunable in a second moment with tunefs); so I'm able to use (by default) only up to 90% of it.
I'm not expert enough to know if the HFS+ journaled filesystem will place any additional (hidden) file, but I suppose that I'm on the right way… can you tell me something more?
I really appreciate any help you can provide.
Best Answer
The sleep image file gets created to store the contents of RAM, so you should be able to make things fit by checking the math carefully.
So, once you've made sure you don't have errors in powers of 2, you can make a small allowance for the filesystem overhead and try using a partition to store this one file. You will want to also consider that the OS will take control of this file on a very low level and perhaps cause the file to be written to the root filesystem even if you take pains to properly mount the auxiliary filesystem. Also, since swap files get written to this same directory, your plan might cause unintended consequences, so be sure you have a good backup and can recover any file should the machine run out of space for /private/var/vm and freeze out whatever app you have running.