How to boot from SSD but have installations and home folder on HDD

Question

I have an SSD I want to boot from it, but use the HDD to store installed programs and keep the home folder.

I'm running Linux Fedora 19.

How do I set that up?

Solution

During installation you will be asked which disk to use and which partitions to mount. Reading you question I think you want this:

[SSD]
/boot
/
SWAP


[HDD]
/usr
/tmp
/home

Why this?

[SSD]

• /boot from the SSD (not much here, /boot is only a very small filesystem needed to start and optionally to decrypt a volume.
• / on the SSD since you will be accessing it quite often en thus gain a large speed gain. / (the root filesystem) is usually quite small and it is here where you usually have the mount points for other filesystems such as /usr, /usr/local, /opt, /var, /lib etc. Some of these you want to keep on /, such as var and lib. Others such as /usr/, /usr/local/ and /home are best mounted from another partition.
• SWAP since paging depends a lot on the disk speed. Thus is gains the most from the SSD. And with modern SSD there is no reason not to do this. A modern SSD (read: any SSD manufactured in the last decade) can sustain heavy writes for years. Your computer will be old and discarded before you reach this limit).

[HDD]

• /usr on the HDD since you ask to use the HDD for the programs. Most of these are stored in /usr (OS/distribution provided) or in /usr/local (self installed).
• /home for the same reason.
• /tmp is a choice. If you have sufficient memory then /tmp in RAM makes a lot of sense. If you use it to also store temporary ISOs etc then using a partition makes more sense.

Comments

[pabouk - Ukraine stay strong]

Do you really just want to boot from it (i.e. have boot sector, kernel image and possibly initrd there) or do you also want to have there some system files which are used during the OS operation? Which files?

[bzupnick]

How much space should each mount point need?

[ganesh]

/boot: not much. /: depends on how many other things you use, but I would go up to 10-20GB (I have used /'s of 16MB in the past with /var, /var/spool/mail/, /tmp and /usr on other disks. But disk space is relative cheap these days so a simple large / might do well. Swap: Not much. 512MB should do unless you have little RAM and start compiling Qt. /tmp: 1GB-ish. /home: your choice. /usr: the rest. -- Mind you, all of this is my opinion. There are many ways to size partitions and all have their advantages and disadvantages. E.g. a single large root is easy, but inflexible. Etc etc.