Which bits of Ubuntu need to be on an SSD?

Question

I'm in the process of rebuilding a budget system from used parts. One of the components will be an 8GB SSD, to speed up the machine while continuing to use my 1TB conventional HD. I already use a separate partition for /home, and I'm currently using Lubuntu 13.04 but might change at any time to a different flavour.

My root partition has now grown to over 7GB, without the /home included. I expect a fresh install will trim it down, but they do grow, with added applications and updates etc. So which bits of the system need to be on the SSD, and which can I move to the HD to leave some free space for the future? Which of the various directories does the system need fast access to, and which could be slow without noticeably slowing down the system?

Thanks for any help.

How about letting a caching module handle that for you and use your SSD as caching device? How do I install and use flashcache/bcache to cache HDD to SSD? — gertvdijk, Sep 02 '13 at 22:46

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 02 '13 at 22:53

0

You could probably save a significant amount of space in the long by moving/symlinking /var/cache/apt to your hard drive; that folder can grow quite large if you don't sudo apt-get clean it periodically.

Otherwise, I wouldn't offload anything else from the SSD. Most of the growth I've seen (aside from newly-installed programs) is from cached package files.

answered Sep 02 '13 at 22:53

nc4pk

109

My /var/cache/apt is only 150 MiB. However, I've just discovered my /usr is 3.1 GiB ! Eek. – momist Sep 02 '13 at 23:14

Which bits of Ubuntu need to be on an SSD?

1 Answers1