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Suppose I have to hard drives in my laptop, one is a (Disk A) classical spinning hard drive (or an old generation SSD) (<1GB/s) and the other one (Disk B) is a super fast NVMem SSD (3GB/s).

I. Suppose that they are not too big to hold everything. What of these options is better for Ubuntu?

  1. Install / (system files) in (Disk A) and /home (i.e. userfiles) in (Disk B)?
  2. Install / (system files) in (Disk B) and /home (i.e. userfiles) in (Disk A)?

It seems to me that 1) will produce a system that is fast for particular tasks happening in the home directory, but 2) will produce a more responsive system (e.g. booting, loading and running programs, loading libraries).

Is this logic correct?

Are there other combinations I am missing? (e.g. installing /usr in a hard drive different from /).

Suppose, for example and in addition, I do a lot of C++ compilation in this machine. Source files are read from both home and default libraries.

alfC
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    Prioritize your OS and software on the drive with the fastest random read speed. OS and software frequently needs to read several files at the same time- a task that is slow on spinning hard drives. You should put your home there too if you can, since your OS and software will frequently access configs in the home folder. Use your slower drive for static files which are usually accessed on demand, one-at-a-time, and read sequentially on the disk. – Nmath Aug 04 '21 at 22:45
  • "Better" also depends upon your skill level and workflow. Opinion: Since a complete Ubuntu Desktop system will easily fit under 30GB, buy a slightly larger SSD to house the entire working system. Use your HDD for backups and storing movies, games, and other huge entertainments. – user535733 Aug 04 '21 at 23:05
  • Keep /home inside / on fasted drive. And have data on slower drive. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013677/storing-data-on-second-hdd-mounting & https://askubuntu.com/questions/1058756/installing-all-applications-on-a-ssd-disk-and-putting-all-files-on-hdd-disk – oldfred Aug 05 '21 at 03:27
  • @oldfred, yes, once one decides to put / in the fast drive (my question) then the is at the start no harm in putting /home (or /home/USER) there too. The problem is that as data grows you end up putting a subdirectory on the slow drive, which is too unflexible or worst having symlinks inside home, some programs don't follow the links properly and it is a nightmare. – alfC Aug 05 '21 at 23:54

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