Hello Comrades,

Thanks for all your advice about setting up Linux. It was a success. The problem is that I’m now I’m intrigued and I’d like to play around a bit more.

I’m thinking of building a cheap-ish computer but I have a few questions. I’ll split them into separate posts to make things easier. Note: I won’t be installing anything that I can’t get to work on Linux.

Question about storage and swap memory.

I plan to install an SSD of maybe 128–256GB for the system files and a larger HDD for storage. I would partition the SSD so that I could install a few different distros without losing any installation. This way I can commit to some longer experiments before deciding which distro to use.

The question is: should I have the swap partition on the SSD (with the OS partition) or (separately) on the HDD?

And if I install multiple distros, do I need a different swap partition for each one? For example, if I install 16GB RAM, do I need a 16GB partition for, say, Mint, Debian, and Ubuntu? Or can I let them ‘share’ the swap partition?

Are there any additional security/privacy risks of installing more than one distro on the same SSD card?

  • redtea@lemmygrad.mlOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    I didn’t realise how much the price has come down for SSDs, so I see your point.

    Do SSDs get worn down quite quickly, then, like USB drives?

    If this is the case, is it worth getting a second, small SSD just for swap memory or would that be overkill?

    • Comrade Birb@lemmygrad.ml
      2·
      1 year ago

      On the contrary it’s better to get a bigger SSD since the writes for swap usage get distributed more evenly across the larger memory pool. Modern SSDs can take a lot of writes before degrading since their controllers are very smart. USB drives get worn out a lot faster since they lack redundancy in storage and good memory controllers.

      • redtea@lemmygrad.mlOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        That’s helpful, thanks.

        If you don’t mind, could I ask another question, seeing as you seem to know about this topic. If I save, say, 5gb worth of pdfs, does that 5gb worth of space get worn down by virtue of storing the data? Or do drives wear down when data is deleted, added, deleted, added, moved, etc? I think it’s the latter but don’t want to assume. If it’s the former, it might be safe to save a backup onto a drive once and to store this for a long time—would it wear down the drive to e.g. read that data and/or copy it to another drive?