Hi guys, after playing around with Fedora 24 in VMware I have finally been able to completely replace my desktop!
Now that i know i can do this i am ready to make the full switch and get rid of windows all together. So hear is my dumb question I do not know how much to partition my drives for, I currently have a 500 GB SSD and a 2 TB mechanical drive.
So yeah dumb question i know but would like your guys input so let me know! Thanks for the help.
Okay. You're getting rid of windows altogether? I'd do the following:
/boot ext3 1G SSD partition 1
/ xfs 100G SSD partition 2
/var xfs 200G SSD partition 3
/usr xfs whats left of ssd, partition 4
SWAP swap (ram*2) HDD partition 1
/home xfs 2TB HDD partition 2
Don't put swap on your SSD. It's fast but can kill the SSD just as fast as defragging it can.
Put your bootloader on SSD.
the 500GB SSD is huge, in my opinion, so I'm kinda having trouble finding a place to put the storage. you could also nix the /var and /usr slices, here:
/boot ext3 1G SSD partition 1
/ xfs remaining SSD SSD partition 2
SWAP swap (ram*2) HDD partition 1
/home xfs 2TB HDD partition 2
My 2c. Definitely have your /home as the HDD though.
I'm completely off topic here, but thank you for mentioning the swap issue. I bought my first ssd two months ago and it already died. I know what it is now. Thank you very much:)
It shouldn't have died that fast. Make a new thread and I can help you diagnose it and see if it's worth RMAing.
you could also nix the /var and /usr slices, here ? I am still a noob when it comes to Linux. I do not know what that means.
Sorry. slice is another word for partition. Do the tables I made above make sense to you?
Basically, I was saying you could not use the partitions for /var and /usr. They're not mandatory, but some people like having them.
yeah sort of it looks like im using that SSD to hold the root/user /boot files on the ssd and placing the swap on the HDD so it doesn't eat up my cache with rewrites and programs.
is that right?
More or less.
Let me explain it a bit, but before you go any further, you're probably going to want to read up on The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard which most Linux distros (Fedora included) follow.
Here goes:
We're going to put /
, or the root partition on the SSD. This will catch everything that's not otherwise mounted somewhere else and put it on the SSD.
Let's not confuse /
with /root
, which are two different things. /root
is the root
user's home directory, while /
is the top level of the filesystem.
We're going to put /boot
, which holds your boot files on the SSD as well. Lightning fast boot speeds? I think so.
Also on the SSD will be /var
, which basically holds data relating to programs that doesn't fit in your home directory or the program library directory, and logs.
We can also put /usr
on the SSD. That's a secondary hierarchy that looks similar to the root of the drive (/
). It's only going to hold read-only user-installed data. Basically, programs get installed here. (you won't have to worry about that, the package manager automatically handles it all)
Now, /home
is basically C:/users
but for Linux. /home/HippyTree
will be your home directory if your username is HippyTree.
We're going to put /home
on the 2TB drive so we can store as much data as possible in your home directory without running into issues.
Swap goes on the 2TB drive as well because if your system decides to write to it, I can guarantee an SSD is going to be damaged pretty quickly. A general rule of thumb is to give your system twice your ram's worth of swap. So 8GB of ram means 16GB of swap.
Hope this helps!
It really does thank you!!!
Glad I could help!
im glad @SgtAwesomesauce has a config you like because there are so many ways to partition a drive. I have a strange one myself, but it works !
lol we are still working out the details. I am trying to make the system fast as humanly possible without actually compromising the OS or hardware.
Every system needs a custom-tailored configuration. It's just a matter of looking at the drives available, the use case of the individual and the OS in question and making a decision.
Agreed
With a large SSD like that I usually end up creating a folder (or partition) called virt_disks. I then use that to store virtual disks or for any VM's I create. I might also create a Steam folder there to hold which games I am currently playing - it's fairly straight forward to opy them back to the HDD when done - although with 500GB you probably won't need to.
Doing either will give you a reason to learn about setting folder permissions.
For personal desktops I just throw 500mb on /boot, 16 GB for swap if it's a laptop (hibernation) and the rest for /
Reason because imo dedicated partitions are more practical for a server, for a home machine folders suffice.
/boot 500 MiB
/swap = exactly the same as system RAM
Laptop, so full disk encryption, so LVM2
/ 25 GiB btrfs
/home ZFS, cached pool with SSD+HDD
snapper with standard / profile, so everything is in it.
Good advice here.
Mine is far simpler. I have the default fedora partitioning on my ssd. And my HDD is mounted as /data and I have several folders in my home folder symlinked to the data folder.
I have swap on my ssd because there's no issue in doing that these days. It really doesn't make much of a difference.
For hibernate though, you need swap = system RAM. Makes little sense on laptop with full disk encryption though, won't be hibernating anyway lol
you are not worried that it will kill your SSD faster?