SSD partitioning scheme

[TBSN]

I'm going to take the plunge and buy a cheap small ~30 GB drive for my laptop and use debian, most likely. I've been reading up on it and it seems installing Linux on an SSD *correctly* isn't very simple...

From what I understand, the important bits are partition alignment, using GPT instead of MBR partition style, and reducing the amount of unnecessary writes to disk.

I am not going to use multiple drives or anything fancy, but I'm considering not using a swap partition because I hear it is unnecessary on systems with >1GB of RAM.

Should I skip the swap partition? Will that minimize writes to disk? I have 2GB of RAM.

I've also read that its possible to mount the /tmp in RAM. What is the point of that? Has anyone done that?

Also I'm wondering how many and how large the partitions should be. Since I'm going to have only 30GB of space its like I'm travelling 10 years back in time...

I'm not worried about not having enough space because I only use this laptop for web browsing and writing.

 

[lxskllr]

Swap - depends on what you're going to do ith the machine. On this box I have 1gb ram, and 1gb swap, and I've come close to filling it, largely due to Firefox(addon?) memory leaks. With 2gb ram, I think you'd be ok without swap, but might be cutting it close. I'd still use a swap file. I think Linux doesn't use it the way Windows does, so writing should be light.

Partitions - I like 10gb /, 1gb swap, and the rest to home.

I've moved Firefox's cache to ram on my netbook which has a very slow SSD, and it seemed to help performance. I haven't done that with the system though. It couldn't hurt, but you'll lose your logs at restart. I'm not sure write damage is worth worrying about. I think the drive will be hopelessly obsolete before that matters.

 

[TBSN]

Yeah I'm not too worried about wearing out the drive, especially because I'm buying a small cheap one.

I've been separating the /var, but I don't really see the point on a desktop computer. I'll go with what you said, the /, swap and /home.

About the GPT, I'm not sure how to implement it. I believe it requires grub2. Apparently it is necessary to align the partitions. Anyone know about this?

 

[lxskllr]

Looks like a confusing mess. I guess you saw the Arch guide. That sounds reasonable enough, but I can't confirm it. I haven't found anything that contradicts that guide.

Edit:
Not directly relevant to your question, but this guy's blog reflects my views on SSDs...

http://robert.penz.name/137/no-swap-partition-journaling-filesystem-on-a-ssd/

 

[TBSN]

Yep it was from the Arch guide.

I agree that its not worth worrying about an SSD wearing out. All the "partition alignment" stuff has me confused, as to whether or not it is performance-related or just related to wear and tear.

I'm thinking it is too damn complicated to do right now. I think I'll wait for solid state to become more mainstream.

 

[lxskllr]

I agree that its not worth worrying about an SSD wearing out. All the "partition alignment" stuff has me confused, as to whether or not it is performance-related or just related to wear and tear.

I'm thinking it is too damn complicated to do right now. I think I'll wait for solid state to become more mainstream.

It's performance related. If it's misaligned, it has to do more reading/writing to manipulate data. If you want to do some playing, I'd suggest a straight install, benchmark it, then do a proper aligned install, and see what the difference is.

I'm amazed there isn't more information regarding that. SSDs aren't exactly new any more.

Here's some more reading material for you. I'm still trying to digest it, but I think it'll be informative once I wrap my head around it :^D

http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2009/02/20/aligning-filesystems-to-an-ssds-erase-block-size/

Keep in mind it's a little old, especially in tech terms, but it may give you a better idea of the issues involved.

 

[themillak]

if you're not going to have a second hd for /home I don't think I'd bother with a separate partition for it on a 30 gig hd and to just make sure to back it up occasionally.