Installing Mageia6.1 on PC with SSD and HD

[vmunich]

Hi everyone,
I just bought a new PC (Dell Inspiron 3470 JMRM7 Intel Core i5-8), which comprises a 128GB SSD-drive and a traditional 1TB HDD.

I want a dual-boot system (Win10 + Mageia) but I ll be using mainly Mageia.

I don't know much about SSD drives, I am usually happy with the performance of my HDD...

How should I install Mageia on such a 2-drives system ?
1. shall I simply ignore the SSD ?
2. shall I put / on the SSD and /home on the HDD ?
3. shall I put /home on the SSD and /on the HDD ?

I use my computer for office work, and internet surfing + videos watching... I want my data to be secure and of course good performance for my system

Anybody has a hint ?

Thanks
Vincent

[doktor5000]

From a practical perspective I'd say 128'GB is not really enough for a dual-boot system for a casual user with a full-blown Win10.
With the next updates Win10 will require around 32GB of free space for updates, and it uses around 50GB for a regular OS-only installation with no further installation / data.

From a general point of view, as much as possible of the OS and the programs you use should reside on the SSD, the data (videos, documents etc.) itself should reside on the HDD.
If you keep your system lean and clean you can probably get away with 80GB windows partition and the rest for Mageia for / and /home

[vmunich]

Thanks Doktor for your reply.

I guess I will leave Mageia completely out of the SSD drive and include a windows data partition of the HDD, and / and /home on the HDD

[kajosim]

Hi

Doktor suggests your option 2 : / on the SSD and /home on the HDD

I will recommend you fist try to use Win10 admin tools to resize C: and D: .
It should be possible to resize C: to 80 GB as Doktor mention. And as you have not used the Win10 very much there should be no need to defragment C: before resizing.
I have resized Win10 to even less, but then I really do not use it and it is not being updated (no internet connection)
Win admin tools will most likely not resize below a certain size (usually about half the physical size) so if you want to resize D: you may need also to use Mageia MCC for the final resize.

Regards

[doktor5000]

Doktor suggests your option 2 : / on the SSD and /home on the HDD

No, I didn't suggest that. / and /home should both be on the SSD otherwise the potential of the SSD is wasted.

[vmunich]

Thanks Doktor for clarifying this.
Then comes the next question: does it make sense to separate / and /home on a SSD ?

My system (Mageia6.1 installed on an HDD) is already fast (LXDE on Intel Core i5-8400 16Gb RAM) ... IS there really any improvement to be expected by installing Mageia on the SSD (I may still try this option since I haven't touched the SSD so far)

Thank you all for your hepl
Vincent

[jiml8]

Separating / and /home is highly desirable; it greatly simplifies updates, backups, reloads (should that prove necessary), and major version changes.

However, I doubt you will be satisfied with a dual-boot with Windows 10 as well as both / and /home on a single 128GB SSD. I think you'll probably be fighting space limitations.

I would suggest moving to a 1TB SSD; they're certainly cheap enough today. In the alternative, put / on the SSD and /home on the hard drive. This is sub-optimal from a performance standpoint, as Doktor pointed out, but will leave you enough space on both devices that you won't be crowded. Depending on your needs, / should probably be a minimum of 20 GB. My own / is 28GB and presently (and I just noticed this) is 95% full...I need to look at that.

And, yes. You will certainly notice a big performance improvement using an SSD over a mechanical hard drive; file IO will be much faster.

[doktor5000]

Then comes the next question: does it make sense to separate / and /home on a SSD ?

Separate in the sense of separate partitions, yes you should always do that, the Mageia installer will usually always create a separate /home partition.

But you should try to also put /home on the SSD if you opt to use the SSD, and then maybe create symlinks for e.g. Documents folder or Music / Videos folder to separate filesystems on the HDD, that way only a few configuration files under /home will be stored on the SSD.

[jiml8]

But you should try to also put /home on the SSD if you opt to use the SSD, and then maybe create symlinks for e.g. Documents folder or Music / Videos folder to separate filesystems on the HDD, that way only a few configuration files under /home will be stored on the SSD.

Yes, that probably is the best compromise to make.