Haven't been active on the forum for a long time, but still hope the collective can help me. I recently bought an SSD (Intel 330 series) for use as a system and /home disk. I will use the old traditional disk for VMWare Workstation and torrent downloads. As i've understood things, there is no reason for multiple partitions when it comes to performance as SSD's read and write equally fast throughout the drive. But, could it still be a good idea to split it into partitions for data integrity reasons? For example if I split the disk into one partition for / and one for /home (as i usually do) and the file system on the system partition somehow gets compromised, the /home partition should be unaffected. Thoughts?
I also have a question regarding file systems. I'm still using ext3 because of data integrity issues reported with ext4 in the past. These problems have probably been fixed a long time ago, but still feels better to use ext3. I want to use ext4 as the performance should be better. So, ext3 or ext4?

Why mount /home in ssd when you said an HDD WILL BE USED FOR STORAGE

Separating system and data is always a good idea, so if you want to do it, do it.

Definitely ext4. ext3 lacks functions that are crucial for SSDs, like TRIM.

If you use your home for storage only then there is no point in putting it on the SSD, you are right with that. But some people use their home for actual work and will benefit from the speed improvements of SSDs. I also use SSDs, in my main system I sort my work this way:
1. If the workload benefits from fast I/O and is small enough to fit in RAM do it in RAM (tmpfs), you can't get it faster.
2. If the workload benefits from fast I/O and is to large to fit in RAM do it on the SSD.
2. For all other cases just use the mechanical disk.

By the way, there is no reason to shout, if you want to emphasize something use the font-options, like underlining, italics or bold text.

1 members found this post helpful.

A separate home only protects against multiple users I'd think. If you were logged in as a standard user, other accounts should be protected. Your own home will be fully accessible to any malware from filesystem permissions. Not sure a partition for home ever helped it except to ease how one moves or grows a system.

Ext4 is the way to go unless you want to look at the more exotic ones like nilfs, btrfs or such.

I am not a fan of swap so see if you can avoid it even if you have to buy more ram.

The intel is a great choice for server work. It tends to fall a bit short on desktop use.

1 members found this post helpful.

I was thinking like this: VM's eat a lot of disk space and result in a lot if disk activity, therefore i want to keep it on a seprate drive (the old one). Torrents also tend to eat a lot of space and the old drive is of higher capacity (320 GB) than the 120 GB SSD. Sure I could use the old drive for /home, but to use the SSD for the system only feels like a waste of usable disk space, also all the large files such as movies, photos, etc. is stored on a server, hence i don't need a huge /home partition.

Going for two partitions and ext4 then

Me neither. No swap space on either my main computer (12 GB RAM) or my laptop.

Thank you all for your answers, things are a bit more clear now