Partition SSD or buy two?

[DrMrLordX]

I may (or may not) invest in an SSD soon, depending on whether or not I can find some decent deals. Right now I'm using an awkward combination of an old 250 GB 7200.10 drive and a 640 GB WD Black (got one of the ones with 64 megs cache). There's a win10 partition and 3 Lubuntu partitions. I will probably get rid of one partition entirely (it was to test the now-defunct Project Sumatra) and move the other to the WD Black, while putting my main Lubuntu on an SSD along with Win10.

The question is whether it would be better to get a ~480 GB SSD and partition it evenly between Win10 and Lubuntu, or to give them their own separate 240-256 GB SSDs.

Generally, the larger drives have better performance. Assuming I aligned all the partitions properly, in theory, using the larger drive option should be faster. I think?

Going with two smaller drives seems like it would be easier.

Neither option seems to be significantly better from a cost perspective.

Am I overlooking anything obvious here that would make the single, larger drive option fundamentally less-desirable? I've read a bit about partitioning potentially interfering with wear-leveling, but that only seems to apply if one partition sees significantly more use than the other, has less free space than the other, or . . . suchlike. There's also the question of whether or not the drive can perform at rated speeds when partitioned thusly.

 

[Elixer]

When you partition a HD, then each partition has different access times. That is NOT the case with SSDs.
SSDs will also be faster pretty much across the board for everything, and once you go with SSDs for linux (or anything else) if feels like your system is broken if you go back to a spinner.

It is also not worth worrying about wear on a SSD, unless you go crazy and write tons of GB of data a day, and even then, the amount of data you have to write before they fail is pretty huge.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you were going to encrypt the Linux drive, then I would think it would be easier to manage that if they were physically separate drives.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I will likely not use drive-level encryption.

So, it seems that so long as the partitions are aligned properly, the larger drive would perform better assuming it has superior performance to the smaller drive (which it usually does) even post-partitioning. That may be the better option then.

 

[Yuriman]

So long as you don't need to access both partitions simultaneously, yeah. Most modern 256GB drives perform very similarly to their larger counterparts, it's only the really small ones that are a bit slower.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I have noticed some difference between the 240-256GB drives and 480-512GB drives. Not remarkable, but it's there.

 

[Essence_of_War]

If you buy two 240ish GB drives you're paying twice for packaging and controllers, I think you're likely to save a few bucks going for s single 480ish ssd and partitioning. You might notice a modest performance bump in a single larger ssd, but I wouldn't expect to see a noticeable difference in client workloads.

Edit: A very minor point, but it is slightly easier to image and backup a single drive with two partitions than to image two drives separately.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I went ahead and pulled the trigger on a Crucial MX200 500 GB drive. It was $182 shipped, which isn't a fantabulous deal, but it was only a bit more expensive than the cheapest BX100 drives at the same capacity (around $14 after taxes/shipping). It was cheaper than the cheapest MX100 drive I could find in the same capacity range. Note that I cut myself off from Newegg and Amazon (not that it was a great loss) for this purchase to avoid sales tax. It's almost %10 where I am, which is harsh.

Anyway, I plan on making a pair of 250 GB partitions with it. We'll see how it goes.

 

[AlienTech]

Seems 240GB are around $70 on amazon.. The MX200 256GB crucial will write in SLC mode and later convert the data to MLC mode.. Which might help if you write a lot of changing data by just short stroking the drive. Some other drives do it as well but only for 5-10GB of data. So there is THAT difference...

 

[DrMrLordX]

Currently, the 256 Gb MX200 SATA SSD is $95 on Amazon, which for me is closer to $103-$104. The 500 Gb drive had/has a better price/Gb (at least from Adorama anyway).

 

[DrMrLordX]

Update: dual-booting Win10 and Lubuntu 15.04 on UEFI worked great until Win10 updated itself and hosed Grub. Repairing Grub on UEFI did not work very well at all, at least not using conventional methods, and reinstalling Lubuntu lead to some kind of instability (it bombed out on a failed sector read or something or other). Drive appears to be healthy though.

Bottom line: partitioning can work, but Linux UEFI support is still a bit wonky, especially when Windows is killing your dual-boot configuration. Meh! Going with two drives would have cost a bit more, but would have involved fewer headaches.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Windows is a jerk about co-existing even when UEFI isn't in the mix.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Windows is a jerk about co-existing even when UEFI isn't in the mix.

Right, it kills grub. Reinstalling grub seems to work okay on MBR drives. It seems not-so-okay on gpt drives.