Arch Linux

Paingiver

Member

Registered: 2008-03-01

Posts: 83

SSD aligning on GPT and Filesytem Choices For SSD

Sorry for asking here, i know wiki and some posts have information about this and i am read all of them like crazy, but i want to be sure about it. It drives me crazy, i can not work, i can not sleep at night. Some says you have to do heavy math for calculating SSD, some say it is made automatically. I am very much confused right now. Here is the deal:

I bought an SSD and HDD for my new UEFI based system.

SSD -> OCZ Vertex-3 120 GB

HDD -> Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB

I will use SSD to install Archlinux and Window 7 64 bit on a GPT based system. HDD will be only used to store data(music, videos etc...).

My partition table on SSD will be like this:

400 MiB -> UEFI Partititon
100 MiB -> /boot (EXT4, was using EXT2 before) (GRUB2 Boot Partition)
50 GiB -> Windows 7 (NTFS)
10 GiB -> / (EXT-4)
5 GiB -> /var (EXT-4) (Was using Reiserfs before for small file performance)
40 GiB-> /home (EXT-4)
Swap -> No Swap, I have 8 GB RAM

1-) Is it beneficial to align HDD too? Is it different from SSD?

2-) When aligning SSD, just creating partitions using gdisk will work automatically? Or i should go and learn about Erase block sizes, sectors, etc and make some math on them.

3-) Is no swap a good idea?

4-) Is making /boot EXT2 instead of EXT4 helps for speed?

5-) Similar to above, is making /var Reiserfs instead of EXT4 helps for speed? (Ony Ext4 -excluding BRTFS- supports TRIM?)

Last edited by Paingiver (2012-03-12 12:25:25)

Paingiver

Member

Registered: 2008-03-01

Posts: 83

Re: SSD aligning on GPT and Filesytem Choices For SSD

Come on guys, at least make a comment about filesystem choice and size.

mynis01

Member

Registered: 2011-04-29

Posts: 71

Re: SSD aligning on GPT and Filesytem Choices For SSD

HDDs don't need to be aligned. gdisk will automatically align most drives for you (pretty much every consumer drive that I am aware of). On my system I use ext2 for boot and ext4 for everything else. SWAP isn't necessary for the most part if you have a system with 4+ Gb RAM, you can just make a swap partition on the HDD and enable/disable it if you need it later.  Also, as a personal preference I would get rid of the separate ext4 partitions, just back stuff up to the HDD periodically.