Ubuntu – Put swap on SSD or HDD

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, ...

Installing the / partitioning on the SSD instead of on the HDD will give much better performance and stability, but your partitioning scheme is too complicated and there's not enough space in / . At least 25GB is recommended for / and you'll probably need more than that. We can discuss the exact amount of / that is required. All you need is / and optionally swap and /home, but in new installations of Ubuntu 17.04 and later a swap file is created instead of a swap partition, so you don't need a swap partition either.

The more information that you provide, the more specific the recommendation can be. Let's start with a general recommendation. SSDs are rugged and durable so read and write cycles is not the most important issue. Disk space on an SSD is expensive compared to disk space on an HDD so it's important to conserve valuable space on the SSD by not cluttering it with unnecessary partitions.