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)

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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If you have more questions please post again.
Bye

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

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