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I'm planning to buy a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition. It comes with 256 GB of SSD.

My intention is to install Ubuntu GNOME and I'm not sure of how my partitions should be arranged. I've always used root and home in different partitions, but I have no experience with SSD disks and I have no clue.

My guess is: 20GB for root (at the beginig), 8GB for swap (at the end) and the rest for /home. But, I repeat, I have no idea even if it's a good idea to do this on a SSD. Also, it would be helpful to know whether the have to be primary or logical partitions.

Any recommendation for my case?

Alfredo Hernández
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    Why not leave the default partition scheme as is? – user68186 Feb 23 '14 at 00:29
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    @user68186 Having a separated home partition can come very handy. – Alfredo Hernández Feb 23 '14 at 00:41
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    Related to http://askubuntu.com/questions/379205/installing-programs-in-root-vs-home-partitions – Rmano Feb 23 '14 at 00:52
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    Question is unclear... why do you think partitioning would be any different on an SSD? – psusi Feb 23 '14 at 04:09
  • @psusi Because they write information very differently. For instance, write amplification is a phenomenon I wasn't aware of. – Alfredo Hernández Feb 23 '14 at 08:34
  • Most reasons for creating separate partitions, such as simplifying upgrades and isolating filesystem damage, apply equally well to SSDs as to spinning disks. The major difference is in the performance implications of the arrangement of the partitions. As I understand it, such implications go away with SSDs, so you can interleave Linux and Windows partitions (for instance) with no performance penalty on an SSD, whereas this would slow things down a bit on a spinning disk. – Rod Smith Feb 23 '14 at 14:10
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    How you choose to split your files into different partitions is entirely a matter of personal choice and has nothing to do with the internal mechanics of the disk drive. – psusi Feb 23 '14 at 15:19
  • @psusi okay. I just wasn't aware of that detail. I preferred to ask before screwing it up. I think I'll go with a separate /home partition. – Alfredo Hernández Feb 23 '14 at 18:55

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You can readjust the partitions later on by booting from a Live distro which has Gparted, which makes this a non-permanent decision.

I am writing this on a Lenovo R60 with a 256GB SSD, and I partitioned things a little differently. I used zram instead of a traditional swap partition, and in the last six months, I've never needed true swap. Rarely do I ever exceed 50% of my 3GB used with 64-bit Xubuntu 13.10, even when transcoding videos while web surfing with Chromium.

Since SSDs wear out with repeated writes, moving to virtual swap in RAM not only speeds things up but it solves the SSD early fail issue.

I also left 20% of the space unallocated, as suggested for overprovisioning by Anand Shimpi among others.

K7AAY
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    With 8GB of RAM, do you think swap is even going to be used? I do not manipulate multimedia in my normal work flow (or do any hard memory consuming task) and I probably wont be needing suspend/hibernate as the SSD is fast enough. So... regarding your answer and @Rmano 's link, 198GB for / (if Ubuntu really keeps my /home parition when reinstalling I don't need it in a different partition anymore), 8GB for swap, and 50GB unallocated as you suggest would be good partition scheme, right?

    Or should I really go for zram instead of using a swap partition?

     – Alfredo Hernández Feb 23 '14 at 09:19
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    198GB for / is far too much in my opinion. My / partition currently uses 8.3GB. I highly recommend a separate /home partition. – chili555 Feb 23 '14 at 13:44
  • Thanks, @K7AAY. Your answer, the comments and have allowed me to plan my future partitioning scheme. I think I'll go with 12GB for /, 200 for /home, 50GB unallocated, and 4GB for swap (as http://askubuntu.com/a/49138/2827 suggests). – Alfredo Hernández Feb 23 '14 at 20:49