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.
Swap files versus swap partitions:
Swap partitions can be used by two or more Linux installations on the same PC (e.g. dual boot).
Swap partitions are better in case the disk gets full. Swap files are subject to fragmentation. Swap partitions are not.
Swap files can be better if you need to change the size of the swap capacity since it is easier to resize the swap file than it is to resize the swap partition.
Operationally, swap files will work as well as swap partitions if they are created on non-full disks to avoid fragmentation.
Generally speaking, modern Linux systems typically employ swap partitions since high capacity storage devices are quite inexpensive.
Best Answer
I have the exact same SSD w/512 GB and Ubuntu 16.04 setup an GB SWAP partition on it. I see no problem because:
Monitoring Samsung Pro 960 M.2 NVMe Gen 3.0 x 4 SSD
First step is to install
nvme-cli
because it provides the most information:Next gather information available from SSD:
The most important field is
Percentage used
which shows as 0%. This isn't disk usage percent but life used percent. I've had this drive since October 2017 and now it's May 2018. As soon asPercentage used
hits 1% I can multiply the number of months I've owned it by 100 to find out when it will die. But they say the drive typically lives longer than that.Source