Arch Linux

Daerun

Member

Registered: 2011-02-07

Posts: 92

SSD and /home

I have been reading the wiki regarding the partitioning of SSDs and I wonder if setting  /home in a different disk (hdd, just like /var) would be better or worse, or have no effect on the system, specially regarding the read/write problem, but also wondering if it could slow it down.

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Re: SSD and /home

It depends on how you use it. I have /home on a separate partition on the SSD, but my data files (music, videos, documents etc.) are all stored on a separate spinner and softlinked in to /home to the appropriate directories. Essentially, everythiing is found in home, but it isn't necessarilly stored there.

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
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Foucault

Member

From: Athens, Greece

Registered: 2010-04-06

Posts: 214

Re: SSD and /home

To be honest, I do not think that SSDs are that affected by frequent read/writes anymore. Especially newer disks with decent controllers and TRIM seem to be really solid. The actual limitation is the smaller size rather than fatigue in my opinion. Personally I do what Roken does. I have /home in the SSD, so caching is better and the DE loads up faster but the "big" data are stored in a regular disk and symlinked to ~. Best of both worlds.

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x33a

Forum Fellow

Registered: 2009-08-15

Posts: 4,587

Re: SSD and /home

@ Roken and Foucault, what benefits do you get from symlinking to your home? If it's for easier navigation, that can be done with bookmarks too, unless you only use cd for that.

Roken

Member

From: South Wales, UK

Registered: 2012-01-16

Posts: 1,253

Re: SSD and /home

For me it's purely a matter of convenience to symlink back to /home. I do a lot of stuff in the terminal, and cd Videos is faster than cd /mnt/Data2/Videos.

Just call me bone idle

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Ryzen 5900X 12 core/24 thread - RTX 3090 FE 24 Gb, Asus Prime B450 Plus, 32Gb Corsair DDR4, Cooler Master N300 chassis, 5 HD (1 NvME PCI, 4SSD) + 1 x optical.
Linux user #545703

erikvv

Member

Registered: 2013-05-06

Posts: 7

Re: SSD and /home

There really aren't any read/write endurance problems with SSD's. Depending on the type of NAND, consumer drives are specified to handle around 5000 writes. If you have a 128 GB drive that means you need to write 640 TB to the drive (assuming write amplification of 1). If you run your drive 365 days per year 10 years long that works out to 175 GB per day. If your use case really exceeds this, you can choose enterprise drives with SLC NAND which increase this 10-fold.

I don't know what the stats are on HDD's, but I doubt they are better than SSD's on endurance. All the SSD's I have lost so far were broken due to firmware/controller issues, not wear and tear.

If you are still concerned about NAND wearing out: on many drives you can reduce the write amplification by leaving part of the disk (~20%) unpartitioned. It will also help throughput.

FWIW I don't make a separate partition for /home, and I mount my 4x1TB raid10 array in /mnt/raid10

Last edited by erikvv (2013-05-08 17:55:57)

boomslang

Member

Registered: 2013-05-01

Posts: 2

Re: SSD and /home

I agree with all of the above.  You shouldn't worry about write-wear for SSDs; they tend to fail due to firmware problems.  Due to a lack of moving parts, SSDs are also more durable than HDDs and should, in theory, outlive HDDs.

Now, could sticking /home on HDD (as opposed to SSD, if I understand your question correctly) slow down your performance?  Any reads/writes to HDD are going to be slower than reads/writes to SSD, however, reading/writing files like music and video will be mostly sequential IO, which is the best type of IO for HDDs, so moving these types of files to HDD, as others in this thread have done, is a good approach.

teateawhy

Member

From: GER

Registered: 2012-03-05

Posts: 1,138

Website

Re: SSD and /home

If you already have a silent fan you get a perfectly silent computer with a SSD. Move everything needed for your computing needs to the SSD, to allow the HDD to spin down. Because of this it makes sense to have /home on the SSD, as /home is accessed often and would spin up the HDD. You can get easy navigation with different solutions, either set up symlinks or use bookmarks in the filemanager, and even on the console you can use an alias like 'cdhd' to go to the directory on the HDD.

Daerun

Member

Registered: 2011-02-07

Posts: 92

Re: SSD and /home

Thanks all for your answers, it was clarifying