Re: Recommendation on partition sizes
On 11/3/18 8:20 PM, D&P Dimov wrote:
Considering that I will be installing Debian 9.5 Stable on a new Dell laptop with 512 GB SSD and 16 GB RAM,
Dell Service Tag?
and intend to also run Windows 10 as a virtual machine from the /home partition (so it doesn't get affected during kernel updates and upgrades),
does this seem like an adequate space allocation:
1MB free space (as per a recent post on this forum)
boot partition, not encrypted, 1.5 GB/ root, encrypted, 40 GB
/swap, encrypted, 16GB (same as RAM)/home, encrypted, contains the virtual Windows 10 and documents, the remaining approximately 454 GB
You're going to want and need that Windows installation on the 512 GB
SSD in the future. I would not erase or damage it.
If you have another drive bay, add a second drive and put Debian on that.
If you don't have another drive bay:
1. Some laptops make it relatively easy to swap the SSD. If yours is
like that, get another drive, swap drives, and put Debian on the second
drive.
2. Get an external SSD that matches the fastest port on your laptop,
and put Debian on that.
3. Get a USB 3.0 flash drive and put Debian on that.
4. Install the hypervisor on Windows and run Debian in a VM.
I have standardized on the following Debian small system drive layout,
which allows me to easily take, store, restore, and move Debian images
between 16+ GB SSD's, HDD's, and USB flash drives:
MS-DOS partition table
Primary #1 - 1 GB, bootable, btrfs, /boot
Primary #2 - 1 GB, dm-crypt random key, swap
Primary #3 - 10 GB, LUKS, passphrase, btrfs, /
Note that I keep all of my bulk files (Downloads, Movies, Music,
Pictures, Television, Videos) on a file server.
If Debian is on a physical drive with extra space and I want/ need that
space (for multimedia editor temporary files, VM's, etc.), I create a
fourth partition with a scratch file system:
Primary #4 - see below for size, LUKS, passphrase, btrfs, /scratch
Note that for SSD's (and flash drives?), you want to leave a decent
amount of unused space (~25%) at the end of the drive for performance
reasons:
https://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/ssd-over-provisioning-benefits-master-ti/
David
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