Hello,

I am getting ready to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop to an SSD. I am also getting ready to up the ram to 8gigs.

I have used many distributions over the years. My concerns come down to the writing of blocks of data to the SSD. I want to make sure that whatever I run is the best for me and my SSD.

I am leaning towards staying with Arch as I run a very minimal install (OpenBox). Would the frequent small updates of something like Arch be best for the drive? Or should I use something like Ubuntu that will allow me to upgrade to the next release just by software (one 700mb +/- download and done)? I just want to take good care of my hardware.

Also I have a 500gig drive in here now. I have 2 drive bays and would like to somehow use the mechanical drive as well. I am planning on buying a 120gig SSD and this does give me plenty of space for my use.

Is there a way to setup:

SSD
/ 30gigs
/home remaining

HD
/swap 8gigs
/home secondary with rest?

Thanks in advance for the help!

Greetingz!

You shouldn't fret too much about how an Operating System treats an SSD versus a regular HDD. Most SSDs implement certain technologies to prevent early burn-out, however each manufacturer calls their implementation of these technologies by different names. The generic terms you sound interested in are "Wear Leveling", "Memory Scrubbing", and "Garbage Collection"

Regarding the root filesystem; Yes, you should be able to install whichever Operating System you like on the SSD. However the rest of the setup you're looking into will require some advanced knowledge of either the installation process of your Operating System, or some serious tweaking post-install.

For /home, I'm not entirely sure you could "split-up" one filesystem like that without relying on some sort of RAID or LVM setup. Either one of those options would cause a serious performance "imbalance". Also, you would have to worry about two drives dying, instead of just one.
You might want to consider creating a few "Scratch" filesystems, or look into how you're organizing your data (is everything under your /home?).

As for Swap...that's a question that can cause much debate, however I'll summarize here to (hopefully) avoid sparking any sort of flame-war;
(Bear in mind, this all depends on exactly what you're doing on the system in the first place).
Have you asked yourself the following questions already?
a) Do you even need swap with 8GB of RAM?
b) You could always setup a "swap file" rather than a dedicated partition.
(This would let you test-out if you wanted swap on the SSD or the HDD, and gives you the ability to change the amount of swap without repartitioning a drive)
c) Why put swap on the slowest drive?
(If you're afraid of damaging the SSD, consider the points above regarding the things certain SSD drives do "naturally" to increase their longevity)

You're quite welcome! Please post back and let us all know how it goes for you!
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The filesystem itself (journal etc) probably flip some bits way more often than the activities you mentioned

If anything, look into caching / buffering stuff before writing it, "lazy" scheduling etc

I might suggest put your root and home on the SSD (one partition or two is up to you), and then have a partition on your HDD which you use to store files that are large (like movies), don't need a fast access speed (like music), or you aren't likely to access soon.

I'm thinking that is what I'm gonna do.

On the drive now I use 30gigs for root, 8gigs for swap and give the rest to home.

I think what I am going to do is give 30 to root and the rest to home on the SSD. On the HDD I am going to do 8gigs swap (for hibernate since this is a laptop, may slow the process some but I use hibernate very very rarely) and mount the remainder of the HDD in ~/data after the system is installed and add it manually.

Considering that the SSD takes less power than the HDD, you might want to swap on the SSD

Imagine the battery getting critically low, and the computer hibernates. If it needs to spin up the drive now, it will end whatever remained in the battery faster, leading to either :

Battery died before hibernation completed, because the battery was identified as critically low when the hard drive was off, and the estimated remaining time was correct as to when the drive was off

Battery was enough, but is now drained lower than it would without spinning up the drive. Draining a battery extremely low shortens its life