"best practices" for using a small SSD boot drive and a big regular one?

[Roberto Ragusa]

On 07/14/2012 11:55 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Jul 2012, Heinz Diehl wrote:
> 
>> On 14.07.2012, Joe Zeff wrote:
>>
>>> Not swap.  If you really need swap, it gets written to over and over, which
>>> isn't exactly the best thing for an SSD.
>>
>> My thoughts were that nowadays, on laptops with a fairly amount of
>> RAM, swap gets mainly used for hibernating, and I think it will be a
>> significant advantage to have the memory image recovered from the
>> fastest disk in the system.
> 
>   oh, right, *that's* why i want swap. :-)
> 

If your rotating disk will always be connected, you may want to have
a unique VG across both the SSD and the HD, so you can move partitions
across them and have more flexibility.
For example, if you realize to need some more space on a SSD filesystem,
you still have to ability to enlarge the partition into the HD and cope with
a partially-here/partially-there layout.
This road can lead to very interesting tricks, such as having the
journal and metadata on SSD and actual data on HD. See:

  http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ext4/30903

(which I have not done yet, but I'm definitively going to)

Best regards.

-- 
   Roberto Ragusa    mail at robertoragusa.it