I'm about to upgrade to a new laptop with a 2TB SSD and I'm trying to figure out the best way to partition it for development work. In the past, I used multiple partitions on my servers, including separate ones for /, var, var/log, var/www, tmp, opt, usr, and home. Currently, I have a smaller 500GB setup with just /, usr, home, and a few data partitions. With this new laptop, I plan to run a few Docker images, a couple of AI models, and 2-4 virtual machines. Right now, I also have Conda on its own partition, but I'm not sure if that's necessary anymore. I thought of having around 50GB for /, 50GB for usr, 100GB for var, 200GB for home, and the rest for data partitions. Any suggestions or better partitioning ideas?
6 Answers
Try 100MB for EFI, 2GB for boot, and then use btrfs for everything else. You can break things up into subvolumes as needed with that setup.
I prefer a 1GB EFI and then use the rest as a btrfs filesystem with multiple subvolumes to manage everything more efficiently.
For my setup, I just have one 2GB partition for /boot and everything else runs from /. I've never found a solid reason to have multiple partitions on a single disk.
I suggest doing a 1GB EFI and using the rest of the space for a single root partition. These days, there's really not much need to split things up too much.
Honestly, there's no reason to partition a single physical disk on a laptop these days—it could even slow things down.
You might be overthinking this a bit! I recommend just creating a swap partition that's about double your RAM, a 1GB boot partition, and let everything else sit on a single partition. Nowadays, splitting partitions on a local system doesn't provide much performance benefit.
I agree with you for the most part, but keeping boot and EFI on separate LVM partitions is actually helpful. Also, you might want to have /var/log on a separate partition to avoid issues if a process goes haywire and starts logging excessively—it's more about availability than performance in that case.
Good point, but remember that the 'swap double your RAM' advice was more applicable when systems had less than 4GB of RAM. If you’ve got more, a 1GB swap file should be sufficient.
I used to do that too, back when I was switching distros constantly years ago, but nowadays it seems unnecessary.