I'm planning to get a new 2 TB SSD for my development laptop running Ubuntu, and I'm trying to figure out a sensible partitioning scheme. Previously, when I was running small servers, I had separate partitions for directories like /, /var, /var/log, /var/www, /tmp, /opt, /usr, and /home. Currently, on my 500GB laptop, I've set up /, /usr, /home, and the rest for data. On the new SSD, I plan to work with a few Docker images, AI models, and 2–4 virtual machines. Right now, I have conda installed on a separate partition as well.
I've read that Docker images need to be in /var, and I can set data directories for Postgres and vector databases. So far, I'm considering:
1. 50 GB for /
2. 50 GB for /usr
3. 100 GB for /var
4. 200 GB for /home
5. The remaining space for data partitions.
Any suggestions or better ideas for setting this up?
6 Answers
I’d suggest keeping it simple: 100 MB for EFI, 2 GB for boot, and use Btrfs for the rest. You can create subvolumes as needed to organize things without the confusion of multiple partitions.
For a modern setup, I would recommend keeping 1GB for /boot/efi and just using a single root partition for everything else. The benefits of this approach far outweigh splitting things up, and it simplifies management.
I've set up a simple partitioning on my laptop: 2 GB for /boot and the rest of the drive is just one big /. I've never really found a good reason to split anything further these days. Just keep your swap under 500MB if you have less than 8GB RAM—it's generally fine.
In today's world, there’s basically no reason to partition a single physical disk on a laptop. It can even slow things down, so embracing a simpler structure is much better.
Honestly, you're kind of overthinking it! Just create a swap partition that's about double your available RAM, a 1 GB boot partition, and the rest can go into a single partition. There’s no real performance gain from separating everything if you're just on one local disk.
I get what you're saying, but I still think keeping /boot and EFI as separate partitions is helpful. Plus, having /var/log on a separate partition can prevent issues if something logs too much. It's more about maintaining system stability than performance, in my opinion.
I think the swap ratio might need a rethink too. If you have more than 4GB of RAM, a 1GB swap file is usually enough these days.
I'm all for a 1GB EFI and then just utilizing Btrfs for the rest of the drive, taking advantage of multiple subvolumes. Works great for managing data without the hassle of multiple partitions.
I used to keep /home on its own partition ages ago during my distro hopping days, but nowadays it’s less necessary.