SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

adamlau · 2010-10-01 18:13:25

Being that this is my first foray into the use of SSD drives, I was looking for reccomended partition schemes for my new desktop setup. How does this look for a partition mount scheme:

OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD3-2VTX90G: /boot + / + /usr
WD VelociRaptor WD4500HLHX: /home + /var + swap

/tmp on tmpfs. How does that look? Suggestions? Recommendations?

karol · 2010-10-01 18:53:07

Do you need swap? /var/lib/pacman/ on an SSD might be really fast.

adamlau · 2010-10-01 19:32:47

8GB DDR3, no swap necessary for this mainstream desktop, though I will probably allocate some space for swap just in case. /var/lib/pacman on SSD sounds good. Symlink it after the fact, see how it goes. Maybe /var/cache/pacman/pkg as well.

karol · 2010-10-01 19:39:32

I initially wanted to suggest /var/cache/pacman/pkg as well, but it would look like you're putting everything but /home on the SSD. It's no small drive from what I've googled so why not?

graysky · 2010-10-01 22:57:47

Looks fine to me. Here's mine:

$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/dvd    /media/dvd  auto    ro,user,noauto,unhide   0      0
none    /tmp    tmpfs    nodev,nosuid,nodiratime,noatime,noexec,size=2000M,mode=1777    0    0
devpts                 /dev/pts      devpts    defaults            0      0
shm                    /dev/shm      tmpfs     nodev,nosuid,size=7G        0      0

# SSD
/dev/sdb1    /       ext4    defaults,noatime,discard    0       1
/dev/sdb2    /home   ext4    defaults,noatime,discard    0       2

# HDD
/dev/sda6    /boot    ext3    defaults,relatime    0    1
/dev/sda1    /var    ext4    defaults,relatime    0    1
/dev/sda7    /media/data    ntfs-3g    defaults,umask=002,fmask=113,gid=100,uid=1000    0    0

Don't forget to check out the SSD article on the wiki for tips on aligning partitions and more if you haven't already.

sitquietly · 2010-10-02 18:55:28

Looks good to me. I ran ext4 partitions on a couple of systems with Intel X25-E SSDs with no problems. Converted one of those now to jfs and it performs even better. Response is fast (but I have no benchmarks) and in my cpu meter I can see that my Atom 330 cpu usage has decreased _significantly_. For your reference this setup works well for me:

sda1 / jfs defaults,noatime ## 18GB for ArchLinux
sda2 swap ## 1GB of swap on the SSD allowing for the sdb drive to be removed
sda3 /work jfs defaults,noatime ## 12GB for audio recordings, big enough for one hour 8-track, 24-bit blah

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,mode=1777,size=512m

sdb1 ## big 8GB swap on a hard drive, big enough to allow suspend-to-disk and facilitate big audio file edits
sdb2 /var jfs defaults,noatime ## 16GB for /var, big enough to hold pkgsrc (PKGBUILDs and src for all installed sw)
sdb3 /home jfs defaults ## few hundred GB for home

sdc1 /home/Library ext4 defaults ## huge multimedia library

where sda is an Intel SSD X-25E (this is an slc device, 32GB),
sdb is a Western Digitial 2.5" sata hard drive (300GB), and
sdc is a LaCie d2 3.5" e-sata hard drive (1TB)

Keeping /usr on the root partition has worked well for me.
Same for /boot, except when I wanted to multi-boot a lot of distros -- before I settled on Arch :-)

The Intel X25-E is faster by far than any of my other drives. Recording audio direct to that drive is attractive so I have a special "work" directory on that drive just for that purpose. Even so a 32GB SSD is plenty big enough assuming that /var and /home are not on the SSD

Arch Linux

#1 2010-10-01 18:13:25

SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

#2 2010-10-01 18:53:07

Re: SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

#3 2010-10-01 19:32:47

Re: SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

#4 2010-10-01 19:39:32

Re: SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

#5 2010-10-01 22:57:47

Re: SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

#6 2010-10-02 18:55:28

Re: SSD Partition Mount Scheme?

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