What is optimal partition scheme for a new SSD NVM1tb M.2 HARD DRIVE ?

[claydoh]

Lol. Why the secrecy over the device labels sizes? It is possible to have an efi that is too small, but ~100mb is a good minimum. Calamares will gripe below 300, but it will allow you to proceed.

[antarctictaco020125]

Here's what I did:

[jglen490]

In reality, every configuration is a personal choice (hopefully) based on needs and system use. On my small, personal use Linux, I have a /boot/efi partition, a / partition, a /home partition, and a /swap partition. The only "wasted" space apparently is the swap partition But, it's a small part of my NVME 1 TB drive, and it's just insurance. My / partition is 42 GB with about 25% usage, at the present, and /home is the fattest, but also the most fun! Oh yeah, except for the ESP, everything is ext4.

I don't hate BTRFS, I just don't think it's worth getting to know - FOR THIS PERSONAL APPLICATION. I run a NAS solution which is very much BTRFS based, for a small, local, mixed OS, non-profit. It's stable as a rock. Yes, ext4 is older - in its ancestry, maybe. But from what I understand the first stable releases of ext4 and BTRFS are only about a year apart. I think they are both really awesome, because they both work for what they need to do.

[oshunluvr]

I still have a swap partition because I multiple-boot and having one swap partition is smaller the 4-5 swap files.

[jglen490]

The use of a swap file or dedicated swap partition is purely a personal choice. For my Linux, I choose a separate swap partition - just because

[claydoh]

Probably not any more. I neglected to double check.

[oshunluvr]

...This needs large swap space on its own partition...

I do not believe this to be a true statement.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pow..._and_hibernate

[oshunluvr]

The "optimal" partitioning scheme is the one required EFI partition and one BTRFS partition and that's it. Anything else is just a waste of space.

Using BTRFS eliminates any reason to divide the drive space at all, less the mandatory EFI partition. The use of BTRFS subvolumes creates segregated sections (root, home, etc.) of the file system but does not fix the position of free space. In other words; a single partition with subvolumes allows all the subvolumes to expand and contract as needed sharing the free space as needed.

Use a SWAP file (in the case of BTRFS, with a SWAP subvolume) instead of a SWAP partition for the reason stated above plus to gain the additional flexibility of changing the amount of swap space if your needs change without having to re-partition.


Also, IMO, if you don't understand the extreme value of having the ability to use snapshots, you likely don't understand what they are or how they can be used. For example, 5 second recovery from a failed package install or otherwise damaged system is exceedingly less time consuming and lower workload than re-installing from scratch or restoring from a backup. Also, you gain the ability to instantly recover mistakenly deleted files. I consider snapshot capability to be the single largest and most important advancement in file systems in many decades and possibly my entire lifetime of using computers - since 1977.

[claydoh]

Article of interest:
Win 10 - System Restore Point vs VSS snapshot https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/co..._vss_snapshot/

Completely unrelated.
It's the sort of thing an AI chatbot finds when discussing Linux with it lol.

[antarctictaco020125]

No these snapshots are essentially diffs, not full copies at all. Barely any disk space is used even when keeping a large number if snapshots.

If you mess up or have a breakage you can restore the snapshot to its a previously saved state in moments plus a reboot.

Article of interest:
Win 10 - System Restore Point vs VSS snapshot https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/co..._vss_snapshot/

[claydoh]

absolutely

Hibernate is suspend-to-disk. Contents of your RAM are written to the swap and the computer completely shut down. This is disabled in Ubuntu because many systems are buggy with it, though many do enable and use it after testing that it works properly for them. This needs large swap space big enough to fold the contents of your RAM on its own partition

Normal suspend, or sleep, is the low power state with your RAM kept alive to save your state. This is what most people use. You don't use swap here.

[claydoh]

No these snapshots are essentially diffs, not full copies at all. Barely any disk space is used even when keeping a large number if snapshots.

If you mess up or have a breakage you can restore the snapshot to its a previously saved state in moments plus a reboot.

[antarctictaco020125]

Thank you for responding claydoh

Ideal and optimized is of course 100% subjective.
There is no right or wrong way, really.

You have to have that fat32 partition with the boot flag mounted at /boot/efi. Anything else is preference

Having a separate /home is not a bad thing, and helpful for quick restores upon a reinstall. Good for distro hoppers who want to keep their personal data and desktop settings, or to have /home on a different drive. Simple and easy.

By "distro hopper" you mean someone who re-installs the whole system with different distros, yet retaining home folder settings?
I really don't expect to altogether do "distro hopping" with the same so called "desktop settings" and the same disk drive unless it's a clean install with the drive utterly erased first. I've always had important data in important set of folders and subfolders that I altogether duplicate and backup all the time, if not altogether keep in an external drive.


If the whole operating system is becoming problematic, that's usually when I altogether do a clean install after all the important data is backed up. And sometimes that "clean install is with another drive altogether and the unreliable drive is filed away as an external data can or disposed of altogether, especially my old magnetic mechanical drives now that SSD is affordable.

It makes no difference whether that source bunch of data is in any particular drive as long as the drive isn't damaged.

Another option, a bit more advanced, is to use a btrfs file system. This allows for system snapshots and keeps / and / home separate but sharing the same space. You don't need to worry as much about partition sizes or running out of space on your root because it was too small.
The snapshots and restores are very very useful as it can roll back to a known good state in seconds instead of reinstalling, and you can browse the files in those snapshots as well. This setup is pretty simple, if you use a tool like Timeshift, which makes setting up and restoring snapshots very very simple and easy. IMO this isn't as useful for the new distro hopper. Btrfs can be simple but also can grow as you learn more about it and maybe use its more advanced capabilities, which won't have handy GUI tools.

I don't see the point of having an absolute identical "snapshot". I feel like if the operating system can't be cleaned up and maintained very well, I tend to do clean installs and start from scratch. I just am not appreciative of the whole "restore point" fiddling because I'd rather just routinely backup & duplicate important data.

I'm not a video gamer, not a big movie maker, not a fancy nor elaborate cgi 3d print crafter, I just do digital 2d crude graphics artwork blog and sometimes collect important videos and other digital books and pdfs.

Swap Basically depends on if you need to hibernate.

Hibernate is absolutely minimum power without being powered off and needing to reboot it? Where as sleep mode is more than absolute minimum? I'll look into it more.

You want a partition for this a bit larger than your ram size. Otherwise just use a small swap file. Automatic drive setups will include this ootb. Any manual partitioning probably needs this done manually post-install. 2Gb is enough.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/what-is-btrfs/


THANK YOU

[claydoh]

Ideal and optimized is of course 100% subjective.
There is no right or wrong way, really.

You have to have that fat32 partition with the boot flag mounted at /boot/efi. Anything else is preference

Having a separate /home is not a bad thing, and helpful for quick restores upon a reinstall. Good for distro hoppers who want to keep their personal data and desktop settings, or to have /home on a different drive. Simple and easy.

Another option, a bit more advanced, is to use a btrfs file system. This allows for system snapshots and keeps / and / home separate but sharing the same space. You don't need to worry as much about partition sizes or running out of space on your root because it was too small.
The snapshots and restores are very very useful as it can roll back to a known good state in seconds instead of reinstalling, and you can browse the files in those snapshots as well. This setup is pretty simple, if you use a tool like Timeshift, which makes setting up and restoring snapshots very very simple and easy. IMO this isn't as useful for the new distro hopper. Btrfs can be simple but also can grow as you learn more about it and maybe use its more advanced capabilities, which won't have handy GUI tools.

Swap Basically depends on if you need to hibernate. You want a patition for this a bit larger than your ram size. Otherwise just use a small swap file. Automatic drive setups will include this ootb. Any manual partitioning probably needs this done manually post-install. 2Gb is enough.

[antarctictaco020125]

May as well disclose where this is coming from: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...on-4175746981/

The size and number of partitions are choices of the user installing and depend upon the use case. Hibernating, using a lot of graphics for whatever reason may require it. Kubuntu probably creates a swapfile rather than a swap partition with newer releases. You can run the command: ls / and the output will show whether you have a swapfile. You can change a swap partition after install. The link below to the ubuntu.com site discusses swap partitions/file in detail.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq