Partitioning SSD and HDD for Ubuntu Installation – How to Guide

hard drivessdswap

There is both a HDD and a 24GB SSD in my Ultrabook.

I will install Windows (for testing in feature, as its free in university) in the HDD.
I need to decide what to do with Ubuntu, as its the system which I'm using for education and for my job (Python Developer).

The SSD works very good, but some people write its not a good idea to install an operating system on an SSD.

If I will use it as the main Ubuntu partiton, the 24GB for system is not enough as its my primary system, and new games from valve is around 7 GB and in some years i will collect a lot data in system. I don't like reinstalling Ubuntu, its not Windows :D.

So, what is your idea? To use all SSD as swap (RAM is 4GB) and install all the system in HDD, to use part of SSD as swap and other part as /system, to use SSD as system and make partition for swap in HDD, or something else?

Best Answer

Actually, installing Linux into an SSD is very good... with a little bit of modification.

Install Windows first to the HDD. Only once Windows is installed and working OK do you bring in Ubuntu.

Put the swap partition on the hard drive as well as /var and /tmp because those are written to constantly; moving those off the SSD will prolong the life of the SSD to match the HDD life, because older SSDs live much longer if you don't write to them constantly, and swap, /tmp and /var are the areas which are written to heavily.

(Note: Now that Linux supports TRIM, modern SSDs often outlast HDDs.)

Also put /home in an ext4 partition on the hard drive, for if the SSD fails for whatever reason it is much more difficult to recover data from it than an HDD. Resizing the partition(s) created by Windows is easy, menu-driven, and painless.

/ (AKA root) takes up as much space on the SSD as you have available. Ubuntu should fit well into the 24GB you have available, since it typically is only 6GB, but if the / partition grows to take it all you can move some parts of the filesystem off to the HDD flexibly.

Other configuration modifications help as well, such as enabling TRIM.

Here's testimony which shows Linux LIKES SSDs... What about the performance enhancement when using an SSD as the main disk? and Setup for dual disk (SSD+HDD) with /home partition .

Related Solutions

Disk Setup – Configure Small SSD and Large HDD

The first question I'd be asking is Can the SSD be trusted as a primary drive? This was built to be a a cache drive and cache data is usually a copy of something stored elsewhere. There's no need for that data to have any integrity. Invalid data? Just rebuild off the main storage. To use it as primary storage might not be a great idea because corruption there is permanent.

Next, Does it perform well? Cache SSDs are cheap patches to plug the hole that is the incredibly slow magnetic disk that laptops get. If it's unbranded (and there are no specs on the internet), give it a quick spin with the Disk Utility in a Live CD/USB

If the answer to these two is anything but "it's fine, it's a solid disk", I'd look at replacing it with a better mSATA (I assume that's the connection but check first!) SSD. Even ~60GB ones aren't that expensive and you can be a little more assured that they're not going to die on their first outing as a primary disk.

Where you plop your partitions is largely going to depend on how you use your system. I don't know how much user content you have versus installed applications.

For what it's worth, with a 120GB SSD, I have / and /home on SSD with things symlinked and bind-mounted over to RAID5 and RAID1 and NFS. Steam allows you to store things on other media so that handles itself quite nicely. And I occasionally manually copy things to SSD for speed and symlink them.

... But I have the space to make that possible. 24GB is really restrictive. I don't think that approach is going to work well for you.

You're not mentioning another option: Throw the crappy 5400RPM laptop drive into the ocean and buy a better SSD to replace it and use network storage for all the data you hold dear.

Laptops are awful permanent storage because they get stolen, lost and dropped. It might make sense to have a centralised NFS NAS where you keep all the important stuff.

Partitioning Hard Drive SSD – How to Reorganize Partitions with HDD and SSD

Please, don't do anything until someone else reviews it. I could miss something.

As /home is already configured, move /usr/share

Using a live CD, start gparted
Unmount swap, lvm's and any mounted partitions
Resize the partition you like to get space from, apply

If that partition is so big, try removing space from the end. So gparted will not shift the whole partition.
Create the needed partition as ext4, apply
Still using gparted: Right click on the new partition → Properties → Copy UUID
Mount the created (share) partition with the ubuntu partition which gonna copy from
Copy share folder. cp -a to preserve all (permissions, ownership, links..)

Replace <ubuntu_part> and <share_part> with your partitions mounting paths
```
sudo cp -a /media/<ubuntu_part>/usr/share/* /media/<share_part>/
```

Rename /usr/share as backup

sudo mv /media/<ubuntu_part>/usr/share /media/<ubuntu_part>/usr/backup_share

Backup /etc/fstab

sudo cp /media/<ubuntu_part>/etc/fstab /media/<ubuntu_part>/etc/backup_fstab

Same as /home add /usr/share, (use UUID copied before) something similar to:

sudo gedit /media/<ubuntu_part>/etc/fstab

# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=e3725608-ee2f-408d-9d53-4f172070ca1f /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /home was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=1063be7e-2105-434c-a9e9-75cf3d02e969 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
# /usr/share was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=34c6fc4b-3c63-4e58-a3dd-3b70926c58c9 /usr/share      ext4    defaults        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=bde0f592-e4fe-4eb6-9d75-eec161e349a1 none            swap    sw              0       0

Lines starts with # are just comments

Reboot

If it's OK, delete backups

sudo rm /media/<ubuntu_part>/etc/backup_fstab
sudo rm -R /media/<ubuntu_part>/usr/backup_share

Note:

Disk Usage Analyzer (or du on command line) can be used get size info. It is more practical to analyze an already used system so all tools needed installed. So space distribution depends on user behavior, some install much -doc's, -dev's, wine programs in /home/user/.wine, ...

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Disk Setup – Configure Small SSD and Large HDD

Partitioning Hard Drive SSD – How to Reorganize Partitions with HDD and SSD

Related Question