Partitions on a SSD + HDD setup

Question

In the next week I will get a SSD for my notebook at work. This will be my first SSD and it will have a capacity of 256GB (maybe even ~500GB). At the moment I have a 1TB HDD and ~300GB in use. I will be able to use this HDD additional to the new SSD (Lenovo ultrabay) - so storage problems can be avoided, if I only get the small SSD...

I have some virtual machines installed (but not more than two are running in the same time). I also started working with docker and created some images and containers. I hope I can replace all my vm's with docker containers in the future.

And now to my question: How would you partition the new SSD? Does it make sense to keep the home partition on HDD and the system stuff on the SSD? Of course I want to take as much speed advantages as possible. Does anyone have experiences in similar scenarios (docker, VMware)?

Does it make sense using LVM with mixed devices (SSD + HDD)?

Do I have to consider anything special when replacing a HDD with a SDD?

Answer 1

In my laptop installed 128GB SSD and 500GB HDD and I have /, /home and swap on SSD, and store other files on HDD.

SSD:

• / – 20GB;
• /home – 100GB;
• swap – 8GB.

HDD:

• All 500GB on /media/storage.

On the HDD I keep only large files that don't need high-speed read/write. It's a music, videos, ISO images, system snapshots, etc. For convenience, in my home directory located symlinks to folders in the storage. They look like this:

ln -s media/storage/Videos ~/Videos
ln -s media/storage/Music ~/Music

So my laptop works quickly thanks to the system and by user configs on the SSD, but large files don't take up space on it and stored on the HDD.

I hope my experience will be useful to you.