How do I partition my SSD to benefit of the speed?

Question

I've watched a few videos on Youtube and read a little bit on the internet about partitioning. But it is still unclear to me how to partition my 4 drives. Besides a Raspberry Pi and VM I have no Linux experience, so please explain it easy. I will be installing Ubuntu MATE over an existing Windows 10 installation which gives me problems.

• 2x 2TB Seagate HDD in Raid0
• 1x 500GB Seagate HDD
• 1x 120GB Samsung 840 SSD

From what I understand I need a / partition of about 20GB on the SSD, and /home is recommended to be on a big HDD. Would this mean all software I install in /home starts "slow" and doesn't benefit from my SSD at all? As /swap (16GB?) shouldn't be put on a SSD, what do I fill the other 100GB up with?

Ideally I would like my boot times and program start times atleast as fast as Windows 10, which I installed completely on the SSD. All my important data is backed up and all my drives can be formatted. I've came across a program that caches applications in RAM (8GB enough?) would that be useful?

TL;DR How do I partition these drives to give me the best speed?

Answer 1

Partitioning a disk does not increase speed. You benefit the most from a SSD if you put your "/" and /boot (if you want a separate partition for it onto the SSD. Booting my system from SSD takes about 7 to 10 seconds.

If I was you I would use the SSD for "/" and /home as a separate partition. But I would also not use /home for your personal data and change the ./config/users-dirs.dirs to change your directories to your 500Gb (so mount it as a partition). That way all the personal files and all your downloads etc do not wear your SSD. Swap on the 500Gb too. And the 2Tb can be another data partition.

Regarding swap: feel free to take 8Gb, 16Gb pr even 32Gb. Old rule was to use 2x the amount of RAM but nowadays you might not even need it. It really depends on usages: if you hibernate/suspend you need it. If you turn of your machine (since it boots in a few seconds) you probably will not need it with normal usage.

Mind though: if you use the machine for the more heavy usage. Run a large database, run websites, run a gameserver or things like that it might be better to store some of those onto the SSD and not bother about the wear of the SSD. In that case I would go all out on the SSD and prepare for the disk to fail: backup frequently and have a spare SSD, or more than one, on the side.