What to put on the SSD?

[snoopy]

I've got an SSD coming my way, and I want to see what you guys think should be on it.

My current thoughts:

On the SSD:
Linux Swap
/

On the Traditional Drives:
/backup
/home
/srv

I'm a bit on the fence about the root of /home. It'd be nice for all of the user's config files to be on the SSD, but it'd mean that every user (right now, all of me and me) would have to make sure to store their big stuff in a subdirectory, which I don't think is really worth the hassle. Waiting for one or two traditional hard drive seeks to read a config file shouldn't be that big of a deal... I think.

What are you guys' thoughts?

[Krom]

Everything OS and application related (other than games) should go on the SSD, including configuration files, swap.

As for keeping big/media files and the like off the SSD, can't you use links so they appear to be in a folder under /home but are stored on a hard drive instead? Otherwise it sounds kinda like using "My Documents" or "My Videos" to store stuff in Windows, only newbies and people who don't know any better do that.

[Jeff250]

Right, another approach is to make everything on the SSD drive except some directory like /opt and then throw all media in there. Something analogous to this:

Code: Select all

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1        87G  7.0G   76G   9% /
udev            5.9G  4.0K  5.9G   1% /dev
tmpfs           2.4G  488K  2.4G   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            5.9G     0  5.9G   0% /run/shm
/dev/sdb1       8.0T  427G  7.2T   6% /opt

And you can symlink "Music", "Pictures", "Videos", etc. into there from your home directory to maintain the illusion that they are still your home directory.

Performance-wise, I don't know if it's actually worth the effort though compared to just throwing the entire /home directory onto rotational media. The above copypasta is from a rotational media vs. RAID array situation, not a SSD vs. rotational media situation, where we had different considerations.

[Krom]

It is also generally a good practice to keep everything that is required to start the machine and load your profile on a single drive.

[snoopy]

It is also generally a good practice to keep everything that is required to start the machine and load your profile on a single drive.

Interesting. I'm curious why you say that - I suppose you're going for the idea of only needing a single drive to get up and running, which is presumably backed up, so should one drive die, it won't bring your setup to a standstill. From a file system organization standpoint, it's really moot on Linux, but I suppose you know that.

I believe I'll go with the symlink plan - mounted to /data. If I eventually set up additional users (say, for my daughter or a TV recorder user) I can likewise symlink.

That puts on SSD:
swap
/

2TB rotational:
/data/media/

External backup:
/backup

And one more 500GB rotational that I'll have to find a good home for... probably /data/extra/ or something of the sort.