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I have a Samsung Gaming Series Laptop that is about 3 years old running 16.04 that I tried to upgrade from 2 750GB HDDs to a 1.5 TB 5400 RPM HDD for Storage and a 500GB Samsung Evo 850. I hit a brick wall here, and most of the info concerning SSDs is more than two years old.

Right now I have a running Ubuntu with partitions all over the place, each with their own mount point. /home, /var and /tmp are on HDD, root and /usr are on SSD. Windows is intalled fully on SSD, because I use it only for gaming (shame on me, but GTAV and Skyrim on Wine would be a pain). While Windows boots in about 5 seconds, Ubuntu needs up to two minutes, which is not what I got a SSD for.

So which directories are save to put on the SSD? Some say I should limit writes as much as I can, some say modern SSDs are fine with loads of writes. Now where should I put which partitions? Can I move /home to SSD? Maybe with links to a bigger HDD Folder for files that don't need to be on the SSD? Which steps should I take to optimize for performance and longevity? And are there any things I should be super cautious about?

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  • 2 minutes sounds like there's a different issue than a storage access bottleneck. That would be a long time even to boot from a rotating disk. You should look into creating a boot chart and analysing that for stalling boot processes. Jun 23, 2016 at 9:41

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So which directories are save to put on the SSD?

Any directory you want on it. I would advice the whole system and store your private data on a partition on the HDD.

Can I move /home to SSD?

Yes. I myself only put the directories in /home/$USER/ onto a partition. Since those directories are maintained from a config file (~/.config/user-dirs.dirs) I keep a copy of that on the partition and on re-install copy it over the new one.

Which steps should I take to optimize for performance and longevity?

All I would worry about is "tmpfs". I'd move those into RAM. And make sure "trim" is enabled/working.

And are there any things I should be super cautious about?

I am prepared for the SSD to fail. And that preparation is: have an SSD in the cupboard still in its packaging, install the disk. Install Ubuntu on disk. Mount partitions. Copy /discword/user-dirs.dirs to ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs. Install some extra software.

Takes about 30 minutes in total.

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