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So I have this 128 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD. And I plan to install Ubuntu on this system that uses them.

Now all the info that I have found in here about similar problems, are usually with limited SSD space, but mine is pretty big. It is a Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB.

So my question is, what would be the intelligent way of partitioning my system in this case?

Obviously the / will go on SSD. Then /home and /swap will go on HDD. But what else? Should I care about "/tmp" and "/var" also and move them on my HDD? How much size would it be smart to allocate for them then?

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marked as duplicate by user68186, Braiam, Eric Carvalho, Lucio, Seth Sep 3 '14 at 3:47


I have /var on my HDD simply because the logs are also written to /var/log. –  Allard Sep 2 '14 at 21:20
But how much space did you allocate to it? –  Kaspar Sep 2 '14 at 21:22
You really, really wanna put the swap on the SSD instead of the HDD. It makes a world of difference if you ever start hitting swap, with an SSD it just gets mildly annoying, with an HDD you can pretty much just hit the hard RESET button. –  TC1 Sep 2 '14 at 22:37
This does not provide an answer to the question. To critique or request clarification from an author, leave a comment below their post - you can always comment on your own posts, and once you have sufficient reputation you will be able to comment on any post. –  Volker Siegel Sep 3 '14 at 1:19

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I'm running a similar system at home. I've got a 256 GB SSD with ~ 90 GB allocated to linux. Even with a 15 GB game on the SSD, I've still got a lot of space left over. So basically, you probably don't need /home to be on a separate HDD.

/tmp you can likely just leave on your SSD without giving it its own partition. /tmp is cleared on every reboot. Giving it its own partition with a fixed size just opens yourself up to not have enough space to open a file in tmp with little to no benefit.

I can't really speak to /var, but this question on the Unix stack exchange may help you make the decision.

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But if I leave /home on HDD, what would be a nice way of adding a seperate part into the SSD where I can keep some more used programs? Because I plan to keep a lot of data on my /home which is on HDD but there are some stuff that would benefit from the speed of SSD. –  Kaspar Sep 2 '14 at 16:45
What I personally do is this: /home is for things that benefit from speed, and things that HAVE to be in /home I set up my other HDDs to be mounted at boot with specific destinations (/media/username/1TB and /media/username/2TB) On those folders is where I put all my other stuff. For Example, on the 1TB I have a Downloads folder; I removed the ~/Downloads folder and put a symlink from that one to the one on my 1TB drive. –  Musher Sep 2 '14 at 16:52
But will you see the new Download folder nicely in nautilus like we do right now? –  Kaspar Sep 2 '14 at 18:22
Yep! Here's a picture in thunar (xubuntu's file manager): –  Musher Sep 2 '14 at 18:51
It's recommended to leave 10-20% free –  Musher Sep 2 '14 at 21:44

I have a 128GB SSD. I have 20 GB for / which I really need (running both Gnome and Unity and a bunch of games, several db servers, etc.)

In your case I would put both / and /home on the SSD, but I would put the individual large folders as projects, videos, and pictures on the HDD.

The advantage of keeping all your documents on the SSD is that they open in under a second. Very nice.

Edit: If you actually make a /home/media and put that on the HDD then you can configure it so that all the users of your computer (apart from guest) can access it. That comes in very handy.

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Also see… for how to keep /home in the SSD and create soft links to folders with large files in the HDD. –  user68186 Sep 2 '14 at 16:57
