I will soon be building a new PC for myself. I’ve decided to splurge and buy an SSD for my system partition, but I’m not sure what other file systems to put on the hard drive I have for data.
I plan on buying a 64 GB SSD for the OSes, which will be dual booting openSUSE Tumbleweed and Windows 7. I know I need to install Windows first, and then let openSUSE setup resize my partitions. I also have a 320GB hard drive to use for data, but I have well below 320GB of my own files to put on it.
I know I want to mount my /home/ to an ext4 partition on the HDD for storage but what other file systems need to go on the HDD to minimize the number of writes to the SSD?
Tips on blogs such as this one suggest putting /tmp/ and /var/tmp/ in a ramdisk but I will be burning a lot of DVDs so that isn’t realistic. Therefore I guess I should create another partition, of type tmpfs, on the HDD for /tmp?
Are there any other filesystems that should go on their partitions on the HDD?
I have the HDD hooked up to my current system so I can create all the partitions necessary before buying the SSD and the rest of the components for the system.
I do not know enough of the caracteristics of SSDs to advise you. But I want to point you to the fact that tmpfs is a RAM disk type of file system. Thus you can not put it on a physical disk (rotating, solid state, or whatever).
I’ll chime in … On my “big” laptop (the M6300), I’m running 2 SSDs of 256GB each. I have no platters.
Personally, I think that the hype around writes and what not are a little overblown … I’ve been running this configuration for over a year now, and never had a problem and have not noticed any degradation in performance. I would suggest (based on my own experience):
0). when partitioning your SSD, make sure that you specify your filesystems in even values of MB / GB – so that you don’t mis-align the drive. For example, specify the partition size as “1024M” or “10GB”.
1). putting /tmp in RAM if you have it (via tmpfs) – if you install OS 12.1, the custom partitioning screen has a section for tmpfs. This honestly goes for anyone out there, doing this can make a massive performance difference.
2). choosing a filesystem that supports TRIM … ext4 and xfs come to mind. Add “discard” as one of the mount options.
3). Since you will be somewhat limited in space, I’d put the things that do a lot of reading – such as /usr, / , etc on the SSD
4). /home is fine on either the platters or SSD … you’ll only feel the difference when you open or write to a file in your home directory, and if you get a disk that has enough cache in front of it and go 7200RPM or higher, you’ll not notice a huge performance penalty on day-to-day use. But if you start doing something read or write intensive … you will.
Once the system is installed, change the I/O scheduler on the SSD device to ‘noop’. If you need help in doing this, PM me and I’ll tell you how.
Also, change the read_ahead_kb value on your platter and SSD … again if you need help in doing this PM me and I’ll tell you how.
Hope this helps … I know there is a lot of discussion out there on this topic, but I am writing from experience here.
Good to know that those tips I mentioned in my OP are valid for openSUSE too. I was planning on going with ext4 for everything anyway, except of course the NTFS partition for Windows.
I was planning on buying 8GB RAM, but I think I see a need for 16GB if I’m going to mount /tmp on a ramdisk…
Sorry, I know that you will do it correct. but one mounts the file system on the directory and not the other way around (thus not “mount ./tmp on on ramdisk” but “put* /tmp on a ramdisk" which can be read as short for “put the contents of /tmp on a ramdisk file system” or "I will use a temporary file sytem for /tmp*”, or …)
O, forget it, it is late and I get the shivers of such things, but that is me ;).
You don’t need 16 GB of RAM. I have had an OS in RAM (pentoo) and had ~ 6GB left over of my 8GB. Just sticking /tmp there shouldn’t take up too much space, from my experience.
HI,
I 'm running my root partition on my (120gb) SSD disk and home on the 2nd HDD (500 GB, rotating) for 1 year now. See below the specs of the laptop:
One last question on this topic: Where does openSUSE keep the contents of RAM when it suspends to RAM/hibernates? I’d love to be able to used hibernation but I know I’ll have to have that file stored on the hard drive rather than the SSD to reduce all the wear from those writes.
On 12/01/2011 07:46 PM, AngelBlue01 wrote:
>
> One last question on this topic: Where does openSUSE keep the contents
> of RAM when it suspends to RAM/hibernates? I’d love to be able to used
> hibernation but I know I’ll have to have that file stored on the hard
> drive rather than the SSD to reduce all the wear from those writes.
When it suspends to RAM, the contents of RAM are in RAM.
With hibernate, the contents of RAM are compressed into the swap area.