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I know this might seem a strange question and I know I should buy a good UPS but I already had had two of them and none of them did a good job. I'm living in a house where many power outages occur (please, don't ask me why...) so data loss risk is very high. I bought a new SSD but I'm planning to keep my old HDDs, so I thought about this configuration:

/ on SSD (ext4 of course)
/var on HDD
/tmp on HDD
/swap on HDD (swappiness set to 1 since I have 4 GB of RAM)
scheduler = deadline or noop (can you point me a good way to do this permanently?)
journaling = enabled (due to the power losses I can't just disable it but is it possibile to store the journal on another HDD? If yes, how?)
discard and noatime in fstab

What do you think about that?

The SSD I bought is a Samsung 120 GB 840 series and my mainboard supports SATA2. Is it really needed to put var, tmp and cache on another HDD? What if I just install the whole system on my SSD, how many time do you think it will last?

Thank you so much and sorry for the odd question.

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3 Answers 3

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sorry, have totally overseen your comment. sometimes I am blind.

I don't know what you are using in your home-directory. But I would then put any folder resp. Partition on to your ssd and then put /home onto your normal hard-disk-partitions. for example it is good when /tmp-folder has a size not smaller than 4.7 GB, because then burning dvds has no trouble with sizes like 4.3 or 4.7 GB - discs. swap-partition too on your ssd.

I myself have all partitions on 120 GB - ssd and I don't use loads of graphics, games or music files in my home-folder - so there is still space for about 30 Gibi left. But 120 GB would be too small if you plan to install windows too.

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  • Please edit your existing answer or reply in a comment rather than add another answer.
    – psusi
    Jun 6, 2013 at 17:57
  • @psusi - yes I know about when to comment and when to answer. On 6th June was something up, and was not able to edit it all into 1 answer.
    – dschinn1001
    Sep 3, 2013 at 22:54
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you can use gparted-program - it is given in ubuntu-live-CD. easier for you.

in gparted you need first to create a partition-table - in case you later need to rescue/recover your hard-disk (a rescue can fail when partition-table is not created before that)

(if you want to be proof against hack-attacks you can leave away partition-table, but then later you can have trouble if rescue/recover is necessary).

so you have now a partition-table created with gparted (look there in menu...) you need (allowed are only 4 partitions - except: you create logical partitions, but here you dont need logical partitions (harddisk is too small)) 1 swap-partition (=size of 2xRAM file-system:swap) 8 Gibi (8x1024 MB) 1 /tmp-partition (file-system: ext4) about 10 Gibi is sufficient ( 10x1024 MB) 1 /-partition (for root - file-system: ext4) (30 Gibi is enough) 1 /home-partition (file-system:ext4) (rest for home is enough)

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  • Thanks for the tips, dschinn1001. So you're suggesting to put /home on the HDD too? I have 3 hard drives (2x320 GiB and 1x500 GiB) and I sure could find some space to store my home, but since my SSD is 120 GiB, I guess I could put my home there too or is it better to avoid that? Moreover, I would like to keep the journal while storing it on another HDD, is it possibile? And how can I set the scheduler in a "proper" way? Thank you so much for your support.
    – Montblanc
    May 10, 2013 at 22:12
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Keep your partitions as they are, and use the SSD to cache them. See How do I install and use flashcache/bcache to cache HDD to SSD?

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