[SOLVED] Two drive system query

Starfall · 2011-08-22 20:47:10

Hello there

I just finished building a new system last week, I'm currently running Ubuntu on it (thought I'd give it another shot, but I NEED Arch back, I miss it).

The system has a 60GB SSD and a 1TB SATA drive.

I'm wanting to get back up and running with Arch. I'd like to use the SSD for perhaps a 'system partition', if you will, and the SATA drive as a 'data partition'.

So, I have a couple questions;

How would you guys recommend I lay out my partitions? I want to use the SSD's speed advantage, so perhaps use it for boot and root, but also take into consideration that this is limited space, so then maybe mount home on the SATA drive?

I'm not too experienced with Arch, I've only ever gone through the install about 3 times, so apologies if some of the above is painful! I'm wanting to get into Arch properly

Also any advice on how to go about laying out these mount points/partitions in the installer will be greatly appreciated! (Again, I'm not too experienced, so this might be a bit tricky for me!)

Thanks in advance!

Last edited by Starfall (2011-08-24 12:49:28)

Earnestly · 2011-08-22 21:17:47

Try: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSD

anonymous_user · 2011-08-23 00:21:34

You could also create a separate partition for your data. You don't have to use /home to save all your files.

stqn · 2011-08-23 00:52:13

The main thing to take into account with SSDs is to avoid writing a lot of data to them on a daily basis. I have some programs that write a lot to their configuration directory in ~, so I symlinked them to another HD... It would be simpler to place /home on another HD I guess.

fukawi2 · 2011-08-23 04:07:48

I have this setup on my work and home desktop, as well as my laptop (SSD for system, platter disk for data).

I use LVM and create 2 Volume Groups: "SSD" and "HDD". Then I create LV's as required in each VG. Everything except /home goes on the SSD. I create an LV for /home on the "HDD" VG, and some extra partitions for /mnt (eg, /mnt/vbox/ for VirtualBox virtual disks)

Starfall · 2011-08-23 09:18:08

Thanks for all the replies everyone!

Perhaps it'd be easier for me to set up the partitions using a gparted live cd, then set the block/mount points in the Arch setup? I feel this'd probably be the easiest method, though I want to implement the most sound practice that will enable my system to perform a it's best.

So, the partitions I'll need are: / - /boot - /home - /var - /tmp - swap. Is that correct?

If so, I was thinking I'd put / & /boot on the SSD, but I'd still have a lot of space to play with? Hmmm, perhaps I should only have Home on the SATA drive? I'm really not sure, I guess this is why I'm asking you guys, I'm open to all suggestions.

Also, one thing that is obviously very important... how big do I make each partition!? I have no idea how big all of the partitions I mentioned above need to be? (Also is there a particular swap size that's needed to suspend?)

Apologies, I know it's a lot of questions, any help is greatly appreciated

satanselbow · 2011-08-23 09:24:06

Might be a good idea to get your /var off the ssd as there is a lot of temp/lock file movement going on there - it can also grow quite large if left unchecked

/boot = 150MB
/(root) = 20GB

swap = 1 -> 2 x system ram if you want to suspend/hibernate

/home = whatever you want

I've just clean installed with the new ISO and these partition sizes are based on my own personal usage on my original install. I do not use wine at all - if you do you may want to increase the size of your root partition to account for large windows app installs

Last edited by satanselbow (2011-08-23 09:28:27)

Starfall · 2011-08-23 09:41:48

Thanks satanselbow

Don't suppose you have any advice on the other partition sizes?

I'm thinking I'll probably end up with /boot and root on the SSD (I do use Wine indeed so I'll probably use the remainder of the disk for my root partition, I hope that'll suffice! I might even have to put it on the TB drive, 60GB really isn't a whole lot haha)

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 10:55:45

satanselbow wrote:

increase the size of your root partition to account for large windows app installs

Wine programs install by default to /home (~/.wine)

Starfall wrote:

60GB really isn't a whole lot haha

It is more than enough for a /root (/) partition though.

As an example, with quite a lot of junk installed on my machine ( experimenting ) I've only managed to use 2.2 GiB.
My /boot partition ( using https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syslinux ) only uses 17 MiB.

Filesystem         Size |  Used | Avail |  Use% | Mounted on
/dev/sda3           99G    2.2G    92G      3%    /
/dev/sda1           99M    17M     77M     19%    /boot

Honestly, having a 100M /boot partition with the rest as / on your SSD with everything else on the HDD is probably the most straightforward method. But it's worth reading through the archlinux wiki documentation and adjusting to suit your own needs.

Edit: The usage above includes programs like Blender, Wine, Gimp, etc.
Hope this helps as a guideline.

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 10:58:19)

Starfall · 2011-08-23 12:36:45

Awesome! Very helpful reply Kaustic, thank you kindly sir

Just one last question; How big do /var and /tmp need to be?

Oh, and I did a little test run last night (it's nice knowing I can mess around in the install and not have to worry) I used the installer to make some of my partitions, after which some didn't show when trying to set blocks/mountpoints? These were all primary partitions. Hmmmmm

Last edited by Starfall (2011-08-23 12:40:57)

satanselbow · 2011-08-23 12:42:18

Kaustic wrote:

Wine programs install by default to /home (~/.wine)

Ooop! My mistake - thought they went somewhere more serious

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 12:56:22

Starfall wrote:

Just one last question; How big do /var and /tmp need to be?

Typically /var can range from 128M to ~500M, given you have a 1TB drive, it's probably not a major issue to just use 500M. ( I'd probably use less )

/tmp on the other hand can be quite difficult to determine. If you restrict it you might wind up with problems when copying large files, ripping dvd's, editing large pictures, etc.
Since I've never needed to mount /tmp on a separate partition or in RAM I've no idea what to suggest.

Edit: Alternatively could just stick /tmp on the SSD as well, it's extra read/writes, but you'll get faster file operations. (Keep in mind I'm no expert on SSD life doing this.)

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 13:09:36)

satanselbow · 2011-08-23 13:15:22

Kaustic wrote:

Typically /var can range from 128M to ~500M, given you have a 1TB drive, it's probably not a major issue to just use 500M. ( I'd probably use less )
/tmp on the other hand can be quite difficult to determine. If you restrict it you might wind up with problems when copying large files, ripping dvd's, editing large pictures, etc.
Since I've never needed to mount /tmp on a separate partition or in RAM I've no idea what to suggest.

And on my 2 day old install /var is 825M... one of the 1st jobs run was converting R9 to avi for the kids... and a couple of audio jobs Root (/) is at 5.2G and I haven't installed half the apps I had onboard previously - /boot 19.5MB as I haven't started collecting kernels yet

I keep /var under my 20G / without issue. Leaving them on the nice fast SSD may be the best solution.

Everybody uses their system different way - so will require a slightly different setup

If you look at the wiki the suggested partitions are much smaller than I use - it is only through trial, error and experience that you will find what works for you.

You can of course always resize and move stuff about / resize later with a live CD and gparted

stqn · 2011-08-23 13:25:49

There are many threads about partition sizes in this forum. I'm not sure how easy they are to find so I'll answer anyway... Be careful with the numbers given by Kaustic, most people have bigger disk usage. There was a thread about this just yesterday I think... Double the values at least.

Also it would be simpler and faster to let /var on /. There _is_ disk usage going on in /var, but the main reason why I got an SSD was to speed up pacman... With /var on a normal HDD, it won't go any faster.

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 13:44:22

True enough, some people use quite a lot of /var (Email servers)

Currently my /var including pacman downloads and abs totals:

du -hs /var
74M	/var

But then, I do clean it out now and then

--- slightly OT ---

stqn wrote:

There _is_ disk usage going on in /var, but the main reason why I got an SSD was to speed up pacman

Out of curiosity, as I plan to acquire a SSD in the future, are they a major improvement in your current configuration?

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 13:50:19)

Starfall · 2011-08-23 13:58:11

Thanks very much for all your feedback, this is exactly what I wanted, a good collaboration of different people's opinions/experiences

How can I go about keeping /var within /(root) ? I was under the impression that it had to be on it's own partition? (I'm fine once I get into the system, I promise! Haha)

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 14:01:08

Simply don't create a partition for /var (by default it's under /)

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 14:02:42)

stqn · 2011-08-23 14:17:20

Kaustic wrote:

Out of curiosity, as I plan to acquire a SSD in the future, are they a major improvement in your current configuration?

I can't make a serious comparison because I changed all my hardware at the same time (from a 250GB IDE 2.5" HDD + Pentium-M laptop, to a Core i3 desktop + SSD).

The most dramatic speed improvement was with pacman. I think it went from about 60-90 seconds to run pacman the first time after boot to less than 5 seconds (on ext3/ext4). (pacman might have seen improvements since.)

It also seemed to help with launching applications (especially Firefox) and boot time. I'd say loading times probably took half or a third of the time as before.

Starfall · 2011-08-23 14:26:20

Ah, that's a nice answer!

I'll be trying all this tonight I think. I'd certainly appreciate everyone's opinion on the below idea for the layout:

SSD:

sda1 - /boot - (need some help on size, I have no idea what SysLinux is)

sda2 - /(root with var) - Using the remainder of the diskspace available after the /boot partition is created)

HDD:

sdb1 - /tmp - Perhaps about 10GB? Or is that just ridiculous? I have a whole TB to play with, I keep all my media on a server
sdb2 - /home - However much room I have left after making /tmp and the 8GB swap space below
sdb3 - swap - 8GB

So, le verdict:

Still unsure how big boot needs to be?
Still unsure how big /tmp needs to be? (saving on diskspace really doesn't matter to me)

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 14:46:14

/boot can be 100M easily (~4 kernels). There's really not much point in making it much bigger unless you have dozens of different custom kernels.

Use grub, you can look up information about syslinux later, however;

Syslinux is basically a lightweight successor to grub, read more here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Syslinux ( The automated installer worked perfectly for me. )

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 14:57:04)

Starfall · 2011-08-23 14:51:26

Great! Thanks very much! I'm certainly going to check out Syslinux Though I can see it states on the wiki about loading the MBR, I've heard that a GPT partition table is better to go with? Is Syslinux capable of reading GPT?

One last question (Hopefully )

What filesystem should I use? I've seen it's suggested that ext2 is used for root and boot and then ext4 for home?

Last edited by Starfall (2011-08-23 14:53:41)

Inxsible · 2011-08-23 14:51:56

1) you don't need a separate boot when you have the root on the SSD itself. Are you going to use the same boot partition for multiple linux distros? If not, i wouldn't bother with a separate /boot.

2) you should probably not create a partition for /tmp anymore since now its mounted as tmpfs within fstab directly.

3) You do not need an 8GB swap -- that's a lot of space wastage. Ask yourself simple questions -- do you plan to hibernate? no - go for 512MB swap. yes- go for a little more than RAM (to account for bad sectors) - 5GB should be sufficient if you have 4GB RAM

4) Finally search the numerous topics that as the same questions. Lots of answers in there too. It boils down to what you like and what you are comfortable with. I would go with a separate /var partition with reiserfs on it. Put it on the HDD, if you are uncomfortable putting it on SSD. Using reiserfs itself makes pacman go much faster than using ext3/4, atleast in my opinion.

Earnestly · 2011-08-23 14:53:46

Never gave much thought about it, always used the default ext2 for /boot and ext4 for the rest.

Edit: What Inxsible said.

Last edited by Earnestly (2011-08-23 14:55:14)

Inxsible · 2011-08-23 14:59:53

Starfall wrote:

What filesystem should I use? I've seen it's suggested that ext2 is used for root and boot and then ext4 for home?

You need a lot of reading to do. You shouldn't use ext2 for root unless you are willing to re-install each time the power goes out and corrupts your root partition when you are in the middle of something. Ext2 does not have journalling capabilities.. ext3 and ext4 do, therefore they can recover easily in case there is an issue.

ext2 was preferred for boot, because that partition does not get too many write operations -- which is why you don't need journalling as much on it. Search the wiki and wikipedia for more detailed information on the filesystems. These days however, I tend to put /boot on the root partition itself, so there is no question of a different filesystem for boot. Easier that way, IMO

Starfall · 2011-08-23 15:09:20

Thanks very much for the info Inxsible.

So, with my SSD I can pretty much just have 2 partitions, one for /(root),/boot, (tmpfs) and another for var formatted as reiserfs?

Then, with my HDD I would just put /home and swap there?

If this is the case, this is great news During Arch setup, specifying the blocks/mount points, how can I go about setting different parts of the system onto one partition?(i.e /,/boot,/var on one partition) Surely, when I select the partition to tell Arch what I want it set as, I can only select one?

Apologies if this doesn't make too much sense!

Arch Linux

#1 2011-08-22 20:47:10

[SOLVED] Two drive system query

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