[PLUG] Configuring Dual SSD/spinning HD System

[King Beowulf]

On 10/23/2015 05:05 PM, Dale Snell wrote:
> 
> First off, I'd have multiple partitions.  This nonsense of having
> one partition to rule them all is just that, nonsense. 

No, it is not nonsense.

> In my
> case, I go so far as to use LVM.  I can have one logical volume to
> hold /, and one to hold /home, /opt/ and /usr/local.  /boot goes
> on a separate physical partition.  /tmp is in memory using tmpfs.
> /var (and thus /var/tmp) goes on my rotating disk.  As I said,
> that's how I set my system up, and it works quite nicely for me.
> YMMV, of course.

It depends on your data usage and applications and is overkill for a
simple desktop or small private server.
> 
> Here's my basic setup, from lsblk:
> (sdb is my SSD; sdc is my rotating medium hard drive)
> NAME                           SIZE  TYPE MOUNTPOINT
> sdb                          119.2G  disk 
> ├─sdb1                         512M  part /boot
> ├─sdb2                         8.1G  part [SWAP]
> ├─sdb3                          25G  part 
> │ └─vg_Fedora-lv0_root.usr      15G  lvm  /
> └─sdb4                        85.7G  part 
>   ├─vg_Zothique-lv0_home        50G  lvm  /home
>   ├─vg_Zothique-lv1_usr.local    8G  lvm  /usr/local
>   └─vg_Zothique-lv2_opt          8G  lvm  /opt
> sdc                          931.5G  disk 
> └─sdc2                           8G  part /var
> 
>

Complex partition schemes are a relic of the past when hard drives where
unreliable, expensive and tape drive backup was slow.  Its a bit
overkill these days.  Opinions will vary on this, and have generated a
number of flame wars, but mainly all anyone needs is / (with all misc
directories), /home and /swap.

As for LVM, very handy for large multiuser server installs were
predicting how much space might be needed can be challenging and/or for
adding storage on the fly - especially in the  old days of small
expensive hard drives.  For modern desktops and small servers, again,
overkill.  Terabyte hard drives are cheap, and I doubt many on this list
will "run out" of space where they need to dynamically add space to a
logical volume.

its funny how people are so concerned with "wearing out the SSD," that
they put all the wrong stuff on it.  If you want to make good use of the
SSD speed, partition in such a way that the hard drive I/O heavy apps
run off it - as in /home and where ever you put the databases and web
server data.  Data R/W speed to the drive is far more important than how
fast you can boot.

Here we have a laptop with a 240 GB SSD.  One big partition.  That SSD
with outlast that laptop.

Just My 2 cents.