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#1 2011-05-31 05:37:20

alphamaennchen
Member
Registered: 2011-05-31
Posts: 4

Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

Hello guys,

I have a laptop with a 500GB Harddisk and a 80 GB SSD installed, and I would like to get the most efficient partition layout.
Note: Many times I have seen people suggesting putting the swap or the /var/tmp on the SSD, that is definitely something i do not want. SSD Disks have a limited number of write operations before they die, and therefore putting the Swap to the SSD is ridiculous.

I have come up with the following partitions scheme, and i would like to discuss, and refine that with you:
--- To make things easier I called the HDD hddX and the SSD ssdX. ---



/dev/ssd1        /boot            ext2        noauto,noatime    1 2
/dev/ssd2        /            ext4        noatime        0 1
/dev/hdd1        /var/tmp        ext4        noatime        0 0       # on hdd for compilation
/dev/hdd2        /home            ext4        noatime        0 0
tempfs            /tmp            tmpfs defaults,nosuid,size=1024M,mode=1777    0 0

16 GIG Swap at beginning of HDD!




Is there any refinement you see? Or anything else in /var that must go on the HDD?



Best Wishes,
Daniel

Last edited by alphamaennchen (2011-05-31 05:37:52)

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#2 2011-05-31 05:50:50

JokerBoy
Member
From: România
Registered: 2009-09-24
Posts: 641

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

/var/tmp for compilation? maybe you want to say here /dev/shm .. and it's tmpfs so you don't have to worry with this.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php//dev/shm

16GB for swap means you have 16GB of RAM, no? then you can use a bigger size for /tmp

shm              /dev/shm         tmpfs       defaults,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=6G        0      
/dev/ssd1        /boot            ext2        noauto,noatime    1 2
/dev/ssd2        /                ext4        noatime,discard   0 1
/dev/hdd1        /var             ext4        noatime           0 0
/dev/hdd2        /home            ext4        noatime           0 0
tmpfs            /tmp             tmpfs       defaults,nosuid,noatime,size=2G,mode=1777 0 0

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#3 2011-05-31 06:26:14

graysky
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From: :wq
Registered: 2008-12-01
Posts: 10,595
Website

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

I have a very similar setup: 80 G SSD + 1000 G HDD.

SSD1 = Root = 10 G
SSD2 = /home ~64.5 G (rest of drive)

Everything else on HDD
/var /boot /data and misc. other partitions for clean chroots, backup repos, etc.

Read wiki pages on SSD and /dev/shm as JB suggestion - most of which I wrote tongue

Last edited by graysky (2011-05-31 06:27:59)


CPU-optimized Linux-ck packages @ Repo-ck  • AUR packagesZsh and other configs

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#4 2011-05-31 08:23:09

alphamaennchen
Member
Registered: 2011-05-31
Posts: 4

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

Thank you very much for your assistance! I really appreciate that!

@gravsky: Isn't it that in your Setup the SSD will not affect the system bootup times? (If I unserstood that also /usr and /var/lib and such are on the harddisk)?
@JB: Thankx for your suggestion, I also thought about putting the /var on the SSD itself to increase bootup speed while actually keeping the /var/tmp at the hdd, something like that actually

shm              /dev/shm         tmpfs       defaults,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=6G        0      
/dev/ssd1        /boot            ext2        noauto,noatime    1 2
/dev/ssd2        /                ext4        noatime,discard   0 1
/dev/ssd3        /var             ext4        noatime           0 0
/dev/hdd1        /var/tmp         ext4        noatime           0 0   
/dev/hdd2        /home            ext4        noatime           0 0
tmpfs            /tmp             tmpfs       defaults,nosuid,noatime,size=2G,mode=1777 0 0

Any more improvements on this?


Thanks for everything guys

Last edited by alphamaennchen (2011-05-31 08:23:33)

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#5 2011-05-31 09:37:15

fsss
Member
Registered: 2010-04-09
Posts: 11

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

alphamaennchen wrote:

SSD Disks have a limited number of write operations before they die, and therefore putting the Swap to the SSD is ridiculous.

Why? If you have enough RAM memory, system shouldn't use swap at all. Swap partition only make sense when you intend to hibernate system. Even if you hibernate several times per day it means nothing for a limited write cycles (e.g. max 5 per day * 365 * 5 years ~ only 10 000). What's more, the benefit will be much faster resume system from partition on SSD than from regular HDD.
If you would like to update your system really quick you should also consider putting /var/cache on SSD.

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#6 2011-05-31 12:06:17

alphamaennchen
Member
Registered: 2011-05-31
Posts: 4

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

Okay, i think we are getting to the perfect combi SSD+HDD setup:

I have 8 GiGs or ram, so I will start with a 8 GiG swap partition on the SSD:

# /dev/ssd1 is a 8 GiG large swap partition

shm              /dev/shm         tmpfs       defaults,nodev,nosuid,noatime,size=6G        0      
/dev/ssd2        /boot            ext2        noauto,noatime    1 2
/dev/ssd3        /                ext4        noatime,discard   0 1
/dev/hdd1        /var/tmp         ext4        noatime           0 0   
/dev/hdd2        /home            ext4        noatime           0 0
tmpfs            /tmp             tmpfs       defaults,nosuid,noatime,size=2G,mode=1777 0 0

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#7 2011-05-31 12:29:56

Ramses de Norre
Member
From: Leuven - Belgium
Registered: 2007-03-27
Posts: 1,289

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

I'd rather put /var/log on the hdd than /var/tmp, the logging can quickly wear out your ssd.

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#8 2011-05-31 17:45:29

alphamaennchen
Member
Registered: 2011-05-31
Posts: 4

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

Ramses de Norre wrote:

I'd rather put /var/log on the hdd than /var/tmp, the logging can quickly wear out your ssd.

Thanks for the input, you're absolutely true.
I will consider putting the /var/log on a tempfs as i only need the logfiles for the current session.

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#9 2011-05-31 20:19:01

graysky
Wiki Maintainer
From: :wq
Registered: 2008-12-01
Posts: 10,595
Website

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

1) Why not put /var on the HDD
2) Why in the world are you making swap with 8 G of RAM - I've been running swapless (8 G also) for years w/ no problems.

Last edited by graysky (2011-05-31 20:19:24)


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#10 2011-05-31 23:08:40

bart_vv
Member
From: Poland
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 51

Re: Partitioning 500GB-HDD and 80GB-SSD for Arch

I have been using ssd laptop for quite some time now, and I have to definitely agree with graysky about swap. You probably don't need swap. It's an echo of the past, when PC's really were low on ram... Today, unless you use some specialized memory-hungry software you can do without swap even with 2GBs of ram. Check your system monitor, it's likely that you have a big memory redundancy all the time. And 16GB swap is ridiculous - you would go mad with software working on swap, even 2GB, believe me. And running all that you have in your system probably wouldn't use all your ram. It's funny how people still think that they need swap today. Use it only if you use hibernate.

I would put /boot and / on ssd. I don't see any reason to put /var on ssd - surely ssd is fast, but hdd isn't that slow - I doubt that var would use more than 50MB/s, which every modern HDD should exceed. And depending what you mainly use /home for, it also can be put on ssd.(/home is hmmm... "unpredictable" - for example WINE can mess it up).

And remember to add noatime and discard mount options to ssd partitions. There are few other tweaks for ssd too. For example, if you put /home on ssd, you can move your web browser's cache(I moved it to RAM).

Last edited by bart_vv (2011-08-02 20:51:27)

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