Considerations before installing SSD for system only

I Have 3 2 Tb HDD in raid5 via mdadm working wonderfully, providing me of a 4 Tb /home partition.
I just purchased a 128 Gb SSD to use it just for arch installation (root) and I have a couple of questions:
First of all.... I will use syslinux as boot loader... is it better to use GPT over MBR?
Second.... I used to put /boot on a separate partition but, as I have been reading, the less you partition a SSD, the better... so, better just create a single 128 Gb ext4 partition and install all the system there?
I currently have 4 GB 800Mhz RAM, and the machine is used for dwnloading purposes and for browsing and HD movie playback..... I'm thinking about not using a swap partition anymore...
Any recommendations?
Thank you guys!
EDIT1: The RAID5 is using MBR... can I run into trouble if there are some other disks using GPT?
Last edited by Xi0N (2012-10-16 14:03:16)

hunterthomson wrote:Use GPT on SSD becuase GPT will always create aligned paritions.
As will plain fdisk these days. GPT is a better option anyways (unless you lack UEFI and need to boot Windows from the drive), but either major cli filesystem tool will align by default to 2048 sectors.
When I redid my system, I just made / and /boot on my 64 GB SSD (and in hindsight I could probably have gotten away without /boot but meh, ~habit~. A 100 MB /boot won't do much to the drive either way). I haven't gotten around to remaking my HDD yet beyond a 4 GB swap partition; I won't know what filesystem to use for the rest of the HDD until I know whether or not I'm reinstalling Windows (the swap partition is mainly for hibernation and Windows 7 can stick its mostly-mandatory page file in it with SwapFS). My main data storage is over my home network.
As far as data partitions, I tend to put them in /mnt/$HOSTNAME/LABEL - sure, it might be easier to just mount them in $HOME instead of sticking them in /mnt and symlinking if/when needed, but I like to at least maintain the illusion of a multiuser system (or just forgo symlinks altogether and cd in the /mnt tree ...)
Adding the discard mount option can have noticable performance drawbacks; you could instead manually or up a cronjob to run fstrim when you're not actively using the system and such impact would be less noticable. Pros and cons w/ either method
(As an aside, one thing you can do if you want to do something that'll go somewhat over your 4 GB ram limit - like linking Firefox PGO x64 which uses somewhere around 5 GB - you can use zramswap. It acts as a high-priority swap and compresses RAM contents when needed. Slower than plain RAM once you start "swapping" but quite a bit faster than disk i/o!)

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As promised, I'm reporting back on my venture - trying to install Intel Smart Response Technology + Intel Rapid Start, but it's not working and I made it work I have tested, and both technologies are working in tandem, which brings me back to the question: why did Acer spend money on 3rd party software, instead of using Intel's? Anyway.... This is the recipe:Clean all partition in the SSD and the HDD.Install Windows7 on the HDDInstall Chipset INF file and video driver ( not necessary, just to speed up the system )Install Intel Rapid Storage and enable Acceleration ( Intel guide here )Create the hibernation partition on the SSD and REBOOT ( required by Intel Rapid Start, from first post or here )Install Intel Rapid Start Technology softwareI didn't measure the boot time with ExpressCache, but on my experience, the Windows boot is faster with Intel Smart Response. Some notes:I'm able to use the latest drivers from Intel website to theChipset ( 9.4.0.1026 )VGA ( 8.15.10.2712 )Rapid Start ( 3.0.0.1053 )But not for the Rapid StorageTechnology. My Windows 7 64 bits PRO would get stuck on the boot logo animation if I used the latest version ( 12.9 ), it only worked using version 11.7.0.1013 ( link ). Since the Hibernation partition has 3.77GB, and the laptop has 4GB, I can't predict what will happen in the situtation your laptop is using more RAM than the partition has.On my research, I think this wouldn`t be a problem because I have seen on other forums people advising others to use 80% of the system physical RAM to the hibernation file. Regards,HalfBit.

Considerations before installing SSD for system only

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