I am a Linux beginner and I have a question about something fundamental. I have 3 hard drives.

1ST HD = 500GB, 2ND HD = 120GB (SSD), 3RD HD = 120GB (SSD). I have 48GB RAM.

I know for sure, that I want to create a 50GB SWAP on 1ST HD and I know for sure I want to use the rest of 1ST HD for /home. Since I have 2 120GB SSD's, what can you recommend would be the best partition scheme for additional mounts. I will divide the drive up that way and also what filesystems should I use for each.

I will be searching for more info on this, but initially, I would like to install Debian for long term, so I don't want to have to mess with the filesystems for at least a couple of years.

I am using Kernel 4.9.0-9-amd64 and I have decided on Xfce4. I am open to any suggestion for my first serious setup, so if you have anything to add, that would be ok with me. As I said I am a beginner, but I have made a dozen or so test installs, while learning to install Debian.

Any suggestions from anyone is welcome.

It depends on what you plan to do with this machine?
For example; if this is your web-server, you can have OS on one SSD, and DOCUMENT_ROOT on second SSD.
Same for mail server, or any other service.

Or, since both SSDs are same size you can also setup RAID1?

50GB SWAP is a LOT; especially for machine with 48GB RAM. But I assume you have done your homework and came to that number?

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I have 96GB on my FreeBSD package build server and have never gone over 30GB of ram while building packages. I routinely build ~200 packages, including firefox, chromium, libreoffice, gcc, llvm70, many in parallel and have never, ever hit swap. I do all builds 100% in ram.

With 48GB of ram, unless you are serving a web site to a large number of users or running a large database, you more than likely don't need that much swap.

Assuming from your xfce comment that this is a workstation?

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I would verify your need for that much swap. If you really think you need it, create a swap file and monitor its usage. With a file, you don't have to muck with partition tables, mdadm, LVM, etc if your need changes, just create a new file of an appropriate size, turn it on, turn the old one off, and update fstab.

As the other person said, try to mirror the SSDs. Put your application and OS stuff here.

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If you're going to put your home directories on the 500GB drive, I would try and a.) buy another and set up a RAID1 device for a little security in the event of a device starting to go bad or b.) pick up an external 500+GB drive that you can keep synced with the existing 500GB drive. In some cases I've gone the "belt and suspenders" route and have set up a RAID1 and still have the external drive setup to be kept in sync each night using an rsync command running as a cron job.

If you really want/need to set up swap partitions what I tend to do is 1.) decide how much space you'll be setting up, 2.) divide that by the number of drives (N) where swap partitions will be placed, 3.) create the N partitions and give them the same priority in /etc/fstab to have the swap use spread across all partitions in a round-robin fashion. You have a fairly large amount of RAM already, though, so I'm wondering if you'll actually need the swap space.

HTH...

Cheers...

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