How should I partition my 128Gb Crucial SSD in my netbook for Ubuntu 13.04?

Question

I know this is probably a question this is asked over and over again but I'm not finding anything close to an answer that I need. I am installing Ubuntu 13.04 on my Lenovo x130e netbook . It has been a long time since I have used Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) so I'm not exactly sure on how to go about this. Here's my system specs:

CPU: AMD e450 apu dual 1.65Ghz RAM: 8Gb DDR3 Corsair Vengence 1066mhz SSD: Crucial M4 128Gb SSD Vid: Radeon HD6320 384Mb

Now here's my questions:

1. Since I am running a single SSD and have plenty of RAM, should I use a swap file? If so how large of a swap?

2. I am going to use .ext4 filesystem but is there any specific way I should partition my drive? (1 partition for /home, another for boot, etc...)

3. I am planning to upgrade to 13.10 when it releases, is there anything I should keep in mind until then?

I have never really used a forum before so I figured that this would be the best time to start. I have decided that I am tired of having to deal with Microsoft and want to break free of their bloated software. I have read through your forums many times before and found that this is probably the best place to begin the process of reacquainting myself with Ubuntu. Thanks for your time!

Answer 1

I think your idea to partition the SSD into a smaller root and larger home and use the HDD for large data files (movies, backups) is perfect. At least that is exactly my setup.

Clearly, /root has to be on the SSD (because this is where the SSD will be most advantageous), and clearly, the root partition does not need much space. Actually, 20 Gb is still an overkill -- I have 15Gb and still over 3Gb free with tons of software installed.

Also, if you plan for a swap partition, put in on the SSD.

/home makes perfect sense on the SSD, as there are tons of user-specific configuration files that need to be accessed quickly.

Finally, if you run any kind of databases you might consider creating a database partition on the SSD. SSD are not much faster than HDD when it comes to data transfer rates, but they beat HDD by order of magnitude in terms of access time -- and this is often the limiting factor in databases.

As for the mount point: you can make your HDD mount for example to /data, and then create symbolic links in your /home that point to a particular directories on the /data:

ln -s /data/Videos ~/Videos/

Answer 2

If you are using a HDD and a SSD, I made a video tutorial for it
since that looks like a laptop APU, i assume you are using a laptop so you probably only have 1 disk drive you could use one of these to replace the dvd drive like I did
if you dont really need 128gb of storage i suggest leaving the extra space at the end of the drive unallocated so you will have more over provisioning, which makes write speeds higher and makes the drive last longer (at least for sandforce based SSDs), since it is your only drive you should probably run trim via cron for better performance
Here is a good guide to follow

Answer 3

Since these answers are mostly simplistic, I will give some tips. I know this question is a couple years old but these are not good answers.

1) For a simple home system, just use the Ubuntu defaults. They should be good.

2) Depending your drive, you may want to put frequently written to partitions (swap, /var/log /tmp) on a HDD to extend your SSD but that will cost you performance if you do that. With a laptop though that is usually not an option.

3) The rule of thumb is that you make swap of at least the size of you RAM. If you are not using all your ram, you should be able to configure Linux to only use swap if run out of memory to avoid locking the system or when suspending to disk (sleep, etc).

4) Modern Reasons for partitioning:

• You are dual booting

• You need swap (some systems with ample ram can actually live without swap)

• You don't want tmp files, logs or user files fill up you whole disk so some people use separate mount points for /tmp, /var or /var/logs, /home, /opt, /usr/local, etc. Sometimes you may want to lock down / so that the previous mount points along with /root are separated out so you can remount / as read-only. Then you just need to remount / (as root with sudo) when updating or making system changes.

• Often I will use separate partition(s) for /home and/or some custom data directories so that they can be shared by different OSes and to make it easier to switch distributions or upgrade as well.

This should be a good start..

Answer 4

DON'T use a swap partition or file. Because of regular writes to swap, your SSD will wear faster. Make one big partition for / (format it to ext4,) so no separate partitions for /home/ or /boot/, because there is no need for and it will only make things more complicated. After installation, edit /etc/fstab, and change the only line (because you don't have other drives) to: UUID=x-x-x-x-x / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,discard 0 1

(I own a m4 128 GB drive myself, with one partition "/" of 80 GB for Ubuntu.)

Answer 5

I would only make 1 partition. / that it. Reason being, say you make a /home and a 15+ GB / partition, but only use 7-8GB of that, you have 7-8GB just sitting there. There is no benefit to having or not having multiple partitions.

Concerning swap, if you're not doing any RAM intensive stuff, i.e. building Android, 4GB RAM is plenty, no need for swap. If you are doing RAM intensive stuff, with only 4GB RAM I would suggest at least 2GB swap. As was said in previous posts, swap on SSD will degrade the drive at a faster rate, although that amount is negligible. Most respectable "experts" say that a SSD should outlive your machine.

Answer 6

Don't create different partitions for /home /var /tmp - just put everything on the SSD. The difference in performance is amazing.

At first I followed these partitioning advices and set up my system this way. Now I decided to move everything on the SSD and got something like 5 times faster system.