Dual graphics might cause issues, but I don't know how the current state of dual graphics support (bumblebee etc.) is.
For the storage part, that hybrid HDD is probably a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB since Seagate seems to be the only manufacturer selling hybrid HDDs. The 500 model should have additional 4 GB of solid state memory that is not exposed to the operating system and works like the usual drive cache, but larger and a bit slower.
The 24 GB SSD should be a PCIe mini card module, something like this. (Update: Instead of PCIe mini card it would probably be mSATA) I would recommend installing Ubuntu onto the SSD, that would be a very good solution, since Ubuntu itself does not need a lot of storage space (3 to 6 GB). However remembering CES 2012, manufacturers were very happy to show us running a customized version of Android while Windows was booting or as some sort of battery saving mode. That 1 GB difference might be the space occupied by Android. Currently with the details of implementation unknown (signed bootloaders, UEFI, S-ON etc.) I would not bother tinkering with this. Sure there is Ubuntu for Android and Linaro (mostly for ARM based CPUs) but it's up to the manufacturers to make this work, or at least to make it no more cumbersome as needed. So forget about that SSD for now until there are more details.
Back to the hybrid drive. Like said, the SSD part is not to be exposed, so this drive can be partitioned like usual. However I can't say how the hybrid feature works out with 2 different operating systems or how it impacts the system performance in general.
This is very likely to be an UEFI based system which varies from the traditional BIOS/MBR devices. But since this is not a Tablet running Windows 8 and UEFI support worked well since 11.10, that's what I tested, I do not see major issues for running dual boot on this device.
In the BIOS both hard drives are there, but I can only choose to use the 500gb disk to boot somehow.
Your OEM system vendor Asus probably placed the 24GB SSD drive for caching purposes, e.g. Intel Smart Response. This could explain why you can't set it as a boot drive. I suffer from the same issue in my HP laptop with an mSATA SSD slot and HP's response to this is "this is intentional".
My suggestion is to use your regular hard drive as the initial boot device, but to install the whole Ubuntu OS on the SSD. To do this, perform a regular installation, but configure an advanced partition layout like this:
- Create a small partition (say 200MB) on your regular HDD for
/boot.
- Put
/ on the SSD.
- Make sure the bootloader (Grub) is installed on the hard drive.
- Optionally use the rest of the free space of hard drive as another mount point (e.g.
/data or /home1)
This way your regular hard drive will only contain the kernel and initramfs for the initial boot stage, which is loaded within seconds. The speed in that is not significantly slower compared to an SSD due to only a few sequential reads in that stage. The kernel and initramfs will then move on to your / on the SSD and boot your system in about the same time as booting directly from SSD.
One downside of this approach is that your system will fail to boot even if just one of the drives fails.
1I would not recommend putting /home on the regular hard disk. Your home folder contains a lot of small files for which an SSD will help in speeding things up. I suggest to leave /home within /, use a separate /data for your hard disk and use symbolic links for folders with large files (e.g. /home/myusername/Music -> /data/Music.
Best Answer
Swap space doesn't use a filesystem at all. For regular filesystem partitions, my thoughts are:
/bootpartition or possibly a small USB flash drive), where the journal will be more of a detriment than an advantage.ph0t0nix mentioned ZFS, but that's not really Linux-native. (It was developed by Sun, and has been ported to some of the BSDs, but licensing issues prevent moving that code into the Linux kernel.) There are two ZFS implementations for Linux, one of which can be built into the kernel and the other of which is a userspace driver accessed via FUSE. The kernel ZFS driver isn't part of the standard Linux kernel, though, which is a big drawback in my view; IMHO, a driver for your main filesystem should be a standard part of the kernel, not an add-on package that might not work if you upgrade your kernel.
Overall, then, and IMHO, the best general-purpose options at the moment are ext4fs and XFS. Of the two, I give the nod to ext4fs because it's more popular and it can be shrunk. Ext2fs is OK on small partitions (say, under 1GB or so), ReiserFS can be good if you store lots of very small files, and Btrfs is good if you need advanced bleeding-edge features and don't mind the risk. I don't happen to have benchmark data handy on these filesystems, and such data can be difficult to interpret because so many factors can influence performance (disk type, file sizes, system load, etc.). You could try looking up such data if speed or system load is particularly important to you.
There are of course non-native filesystems, too -- NTFS, FAT, HFS+, etc. You can't use these as the filesystem for your main Linux installation. (I suppose you might be able to use HFS+ for that purpose, but I've never tried it, and it certainly isn't supported by the Ubuntu installer!) You'd use these for interoperability on dual-boot computers or on removable disks.