Hi all,
Seem to find a semi-consensus (oxymoron), that /boot, /, /usr go onto their own partitions on the SSD with /var, /home, & swap on the HDD.
My question is: putting the above list on the SSD - which is 256GB Samsung Pro leaves about 230GB free. What are people doing with the rest of that space? It's never mentioned & I can't find anything online with re: a better way to install?
Any Linux folks around?
Ta.
I'd put everything on the SSD. And then if you are storing a bunch of big files, like TV shows and movies, put them on your HDD. You can have /home on the SSD, and /home/geeko will be on the SSD too. But then you can make /home/geeko/videos actually be a link to a folder on the HDD, called /videos, so they don't waste your SSD space.
i run linux mint. my operating system partitions on are a pair of ssd drives with raid-1 (mdadm) + lvm + luks. i use a pair of hdds for storage. you could mount partitions on your hdd at any point in your file system. if you've got a lot of spare memory you could also mount /tmp on a ram file system. using the hdds for frequently accessed data will decrease performance.
For me
SSD: /
HDD: Swap partition. The rest mounted as /mnt/spinningrust, and then symlink to the places I need to keep large files. Just can't be bothered with all the clever scheme.
Also mount /tmp and /var/tmp as tmpfs.
Make your life easy and just install everything on the ssd, you can figure out later if you need the extra space on the hdd and if so, mount it in a separate directory.
People were using different disks for different partitions many years ago when disks were slower and smaller. And ram expensive.
Fyi, I have a laptop running Mint 16 on an ssd, plus a hdd for movies and music.
i agree, keep it simple. plonk everything on your ssd. then you have a whole bootable operating system on one drive instead of spreading out critical files over multiple drives.
1stly- thanks so much for all of your replies! I love that there are other Linux people around! Yay!
My HDD is a 600GB WD Raptor @ 10,000rpm. I can't see it as a bottleneck in most cases. What I'm trying to do is follow best-case as far as least writes to SSD. I know they say the things will last forever- but truthfully- how can that claim be made when they aren't even as old as the claim states to extend?
That said, I understand the /var has a lot of writes to it, so makes sense on HDD.
RE: those who refer to placing things on tmp/or moving to HDD (I assume as in Windows "relocate"- please do take a few minutes & lay this out?). I read about making "binding" links…but the explanation wasn't very good.
For those here who have such a system- you'd be doing a HUGE service to explain it for the layman. Really. Please?
Cheers & thank you all again!
/etc/fstab contains a list of filesystem mount points (man fstab).
for a tmpfs, you add a line to /etc/fstab:
none /tmp tmpfs size=1G,nr_inodes=100k 0 2
which will use 1G (or whatever you choose) of memory as a file system for /tmp
for mounting a 2nd hdd partition, you might do something like:
/dev/sdb1 /some/path ext4 defaults 1 2
(or specify a UUID instead of a device). /some/path needs to be an existing directory
how quickly are you going to fill 230gb? you could leave the hdd completely out initially.
Just put everything on the SSD, and use the HDD for spare storage, like Scotty did. These days the tmpfs stuff is already handled by your distro installer. Don't worry about writes to SSD, controllers handle the wear levelling, and your rig will be obsolete before end of life.
Be sure to do backups of your home directories and important files. SSDs when they fail tend to fail catastrophically, while HDDs start by giving errors and a chance to rescue files if you failed to do backups.
I don't pretend to be a massive expert on Linux (though have used it in several flavours over the past few yrs) but if I'm understanding you correctly you've an SSD and traditional HDD in your system?
Ummm well I'd have thought putting the swap partition on the SSD would be most logical as it's going to be a helluva lot quicker than the HDD. The cavaet being that its NOT THAT BIG A DEAL as most systems have plenty of ram and swap is very rarely used - but for some folks/apps etc could help.
Likewise for /var I think that should be on the SSD - unsure of the rationale for avoiding putting it on the SSD?
I'm assuiming you know that with the new/current generation of SSDs and operating systems that auto-adjust for them the whole avoid write/rewrite stuff too much or you'll prematurely kill your SSD - is a thing of the past?
In short IF all your stuff fits on the SSD I'd just use it and NOT the HDD - thats the BEST option. But if you for example have loads of files and prefer to keep your OS on the SSD and the files on the HDD (which is what I have) then just have /home on the HDD and EVERYTHING ELSE on the SSD.
There will be cavaets/exceptions etc but if you're not doing extreme stuff and needing to eke out every milisecond of performance I'd respectfully suggest thats a very safe and logical option.
As far as fretting about having loads of space on the SSD and feeling thats wasteful - the controller on the SSD uses that space to 'allocate' writes etc evenly across it - so there's not just one section getting worn and others never used - so if anything its a good thing.
But again unless you're doing extreme stuff worrying about your SSD's life due to usage is no longer needed. Hope that helps.