Re: [PLUG] how to divide up a filesystem?

["Lee H. Marzke via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

I've had my main work Thinkpad(s) running Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04 on various SSD's such as Samsung 980 Pro 2TB
for the last 4 years.

Everything mounted on a single Encrypted LVM, including /, /home swap ,  VM images.
Never had any SSD problems,  as I avoid cheeper QVO or EVO rated SSDs

I believe the wear gets distributed across the cells, if you have a large SSD.

If you have a hard disk, it could be used to store image backups and or a target for
your chosen backup solution.   Swap to a hard disk may cause your machine to just stop everything
if it ever swaps,  I'd avoid that.

I do run a nightly backup of my /home partition using Duplicity ( encrypted ) to S3

So I'd advise you put your money into one fast/reliable SSD and not worry about wear
and use a /home partition just so you can't fill up the root disk accidentally.  And use
the HD as a cheap backup target.

And definitely include a backup solution.   My home directory is 267GB  and a nightly incremental
encrypted backup sent to S3 takes about 5 to 10 min.    Using S3 means I can backup from anywhere
while traveling.

Use PCIe  M2 NVMe adapter boards not SATA. Unless you have M2 directly on your Main board.

Lee


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> To: "Philadelphia Linux User's Group Discussion List" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, July 11, 2023 7:24:33 PM
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] how to divide up a filesystem?

> Ron Mansolino via plug said on Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:35:59 -0400
> 
>>I have a pile of cheap parts I intend to assemble into a
>>general-purpose workstation; I have 3 sata ports available.
>>
>>I want to put / on an SSD, and I'm looking for suggestions on
>>how/where to mount the rest.
> 
> I mount my / on the SSD. I mount /home, /var, any other data
> directories, /var, and the swap partition on spinning rust. This way
> the SSD/NVMe houses only slowly changing data. People smarter than I
> are still arguing both sides of whether rapidly changing data
> prematurely wears an SSD, so I err on the side of safety.
> 
> A pro move is to bind mount home and var etc. So on your spinning rust,
> you make directories /home, /var, etc, and then in /etc/fstab bind
> mount them after regular mounting the root of the spinning rust drive.
> Now you no longer need to worry about sizing partitions, because each
> bind-mounted directory uses what it needs, without the need to
> oversize every partition, or use layers of abstraction like lvm.
> 
>>My instinct says to put /var on it's own port; and /usr is the largest
>>subdir on my other machine.
>>
>>I thought about putting /home on the third spindle so I can yank it
>>later if need be, can this be NTFS?
> 
> You can use just one spinning rust and yank the whole thing. I wouldn't
> use NTFS on a Linux computer. EXT4 is tremendously reliable.
> 
>>What else should I put there? (eg. pub).
>>
>>how much swap space is overkill?
> 
> The last time I heard a rule of thumb, it was to size your swap
> partition at 3 times your RAM, so that would be 24GB given that you
> have 8GB of RAM. Please keep in mind that swapping should be an
> emergency, not a regular thing. Applications that use swap space slow
> down by, in my subjective opinion, 10 to 100 times. I spoze it would be
> less if the swap is on the SSD, but if the guys about SSDs wearing out
> with large numbers of writes are correct, that's not good. If I catch an
> application swapping, I close other programs, or if that doesn't work I
> cease using the memory hog application.
> 
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt
> Autumn 2022 featured book: Thriving in Tough Times
> http://www.troubleshooters.com/bookstore/thrive.htm
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-- 
"Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion..." - Kryptos 

Lee Marzke, lee@marzke.net http://marzke.net/lee/ 
Infrastructure Engineer Zenimax 
+1 484-961-0369 mobile 
+1 484-348-2230 fax
___________________________________________________________________________
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