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xpanta
Asked: 2013-08-29 01:33:21 +0800 CST

What is the best way installing Ubuntu on an 1 SSD + 2 HDD combination?

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I have installed, already, ubuntu (latest) on SSD OCZ Vertex 4 (everything, home, tmp, /, swap, etc).

I have two other HDDs. One is just Windows (used by my wife, only) and one is used to just store big media files (300GB each).

Someone told me that swap and tmp files will wear out my SSD. Is this true?

Having this installation, what should I do now, in order to protect my SSD?

installation

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Even continual writing on modern SSDs (which yours is) will still get tens of years of life before things start deteriorating. On OCZ drives there's also an overhead the controller uses to swap out bad sectors to further enhance the lifetime.

    That's not to say that faults don't happen before then but that's true of all hardware, and let's be honest here, mostly true of mechanical disks.

    I wouldn't be too concerned. Back things up as usual (when SSDs "go", they really just stop working so there's no freezer or knocking option to restabilise the platters) and you'll be fine.

    Minimising swap usage is just generally good business. Add RAM if you're swapping lots.

    And once you have a load of RAM, mounting /tmp with tmpfs (a RAM-based cache) is generally a good idea. I've added this to /etc/fstab:

    tmpfs       /tmp        tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777  0   0
tmpfs       /var/tmp    tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777  0   0

    That'll have the added bonus of speeding things up, but it does require you have enough RAM or you'll just be swapping to disk (and that's much slower).

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