Hi Folks,

Hope everyone is staying safe.

Now I have some time on my hands I thought I would upgrade my twin XEON machine 16Gb memory machine with an SSD drive.

No problem with that, I'll just do a fresh install of Mint 19.3 and I'll use the existing 2TB HDD for data. In fact I'll wipe it as well, as it's all backed up to an external drive.

So should I use LVM or partitions?

Any tips/pitfalls would be much appreciated, like where should swap go, and where should system folders go like var, tmp, sys, bin, sbin and so on.

Do any system folders benefit from being on either ssd or hdd?

Cheers

I'd use the SSD for the ESP and root partitions, the old drive for home and swap. Swap can get overused and it's always a good idea to set swappiness to 10, but you don't want the SSD used for swap. You can also save unnecessary wear on the SSD by adding noatime,nodiratime to the root partition parameters in /etc/fstab. Set trim to run using
As for LVM, I always think that's best left to servers.

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With 16GB RAM and swappiness set to 10, the wear on the SSD can't be so bad, no?
However, if the system evtl. does start swapping heavily you'll definitely feel the difference between HDD and SSD.

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Thanks folks, not as many responses as I though, but appreciated those that did

Ok.

LVM uses partitions. You'd consider LVM for it's features beyond typical partitions. I'd consider other advanced tools like ZFS and Btrfs while you are looking.

Swap may or may not be needed. Your use dictates that. If I only used swap partition to hibernate then I'd put it on mechanical drive. If I needed fast swap then ssd. If I wanted more advanced then I'd go with swap file(s) and even raid or set swappiness on various ones.

The things you may wish to have on mechanical are things that maybe are compressed, things that don't get used often like backups, things that may need more security in MTBF, and almost all of the nuts and bolts of the OS. You want programs on the ssd usually.

I use a value of 5 for swappiness