Re: Reasonably simple setup for 1TB HDD and 250GB M.2 NVMe SSD
"Jorge P. de Morais Neto" <jorge+list@disroot.org> writes:
> Hi everyone! I have a Dell Inspiron 5570 laptop with 1TB HDD and 16 GiB
> RAM (it supports 32 GiB). I am about to buy an M.2 NVMe 250GB SSD---a
> Western Digital WD Blue SN550. I would like to set the system for
> reliability, SSD durability¹ and performance.
Are you really on a shoestring budget? The SN550 comes in 1 TB size
too. You could put two SSDs on the system easily.
> On the SSD I intend to leave 35 GB unpartitioned for extra over
> provisioning. It would have just one 215 GB partition.
Does that actually help anything? I see it more as a case of "SSDs are
ice cream" fallacy from the decade before last.
> On the HDD I would put a 34 GB swap partition at the beginning
If you're going to page, why page to the slow media? Because the SSD
is ice cream again and will melt away if used?
> ...then a 215 GB partition for RAID1 with the SSD...
I love the idea of using the slow mirror capability of mdraid although I
don't know if it's still there. Also I see from your responses you had
no idea that even exists and assumed mirroring takes care of this
automagically. There's also the thing about 2.5" drives that they're
almost exclusively SMR now which means super slow writes, really bad for
mirroring.
I don't know what you expect to gain though? Up to date backup in case
of a specific kind of drive failure I guess? But what if you get the
kind of failure where both or your mirrors are crap? I actually had that
sort of thing happen on a RAID-6 array. Redundancy or mirroring not much
good if your data is crap. That's when backups are important.
> then a 751 GB partition. I intend to put Debian system *and* /home on
> the 215 GB RAID1, but I would set all the XDG user dirs² on the 751 GB
> HDD partition. I would have tmpfs on /tmp---I have read that long
> thread where someone alleged that moving /tmp to tmpfs makes it
> useless but I disagree.
Any link to this discussion? I really like tmpfs for /tmp but for
everything there's resistance to change first and foremost.
> Would all this be reasonable?
I suppose that's in the eye of the beholder. To me, simple would be
mounting the SSD on / and the HD on /stuff. Or just go with one large
SSD on / and do backups to external drive as you've done before.
In general, I wonder what Debian's policy is on Guix? Does it create a
FrankenDebian? I wonder the same about Debian-Multimedia too. Some
poeple seem to hate that, I use it for GPU accelerated ffmpeg for the
rare occasions when I need to encode video. And they package mplayer
too.
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