What would be a good partitioning scheme for 128 gb SSD and 640 GB HDD

Question

I have a combination of 128 GB SSD and a 640 GB HDD. I'm planning to install Xubuntu 12.04 on it. I have read some question here (like What's a good partition method to combine an SSD boot drive with a 1TB data drive?) and most basic partitioning scheme should look like:

• / on SSD
• /home on HDD

I don't plan making /swap because I have 8 GB of RAM (or should I?). Is there a point on making separate /boot partition on SSD? Would I benefit from butting something more on SSD?

There are some suggestions to but programs you use most to SSD to speed things up. Should there be a separate partition for this? Would it be good idea to install virtual machines to SSD?

If i want to reinstall rather than upgrade should i make a separate partition for user files so I could overwrite /home? If yes, how big should /home be?

Answer 1

First of all, the root will not likely take more than 5-10GB; even if you plan to store loads of programs, 15GB should be enough. So you still have plenty of space left on your SSD.

SSD is faster when making random access -- for example, accessing a large number of data base records or reading loads of small configuration files. I'm not sure to what extent putting /home on SSD speeds up the responsivity of the system; it will sure play a role if you plan to use wine and install the Windows programs into your home directory. Moreover, hard disk can have better transfer rates -- so reading a large, continuous file from an unfragmented HD can be faster.

Given that you have plenty of space on the SSD, you could set up a separate /home partition on your SSD (by all means, use a separate partition!), and use the HD to store large media files (movies, music, photography, archives, data). At least that is the way that I manage the things.

Swap partition might come in handy if you have a laptop and would like to have the option to hibernate -- the memory snapshot will then be saved to the swap partition.