Best Practice Partition Scheme with SSD and Mechanical Disk

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Hello guys i'm looking to find a best practice about how to partition a Windows/Linux Machine with an SSD.
Basically we have Desktop Computer with 1, 2 TB Mechanical disk and one SSD 256 GB and we would like to take advantage of the speed of the SSD without destroying it with too many writes.

For the moment

• with Linux we put / on the SSD and Home on the Mechanical disk but i suppose is not the best practice.

• With Windows we install the OS on the SSD and sometimes we move the Users folder( Only My Documents, Desktop, Download, ) on the Mechanical Disk

Probably it's the best usable partition scheme, do you have any advice on what the best practice might be?
Any Advice?

Hey Giovanni,

Great question, the first configuration will benefit the OS if your system files get corrupt, you can reinstall without restoring the data in Home

The second configuration is the same thing - if you lose the Windows system partition you can reinstall without losing the user files.

The big benefit for performance would be to use the SSD for OS & swap/page file, however if you're paging/swapping memory data in and out of the SSD, you will not adhere to your last condition "without destroying it with too many writes." If you have plenty of system memory and page less then this will help as well.

I will tell you that the SSDs are becoming a lot better with the controllers supporting garbage collection and Trim command the SSDs are lasting a lot longer.

One thing to remember that I forgot is that on the Windows partition is the User Profile as there are application files that are stored in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp, that might affect performance if you move the entire profile to the HDD.

I have been building since 1982. SSDs can degrade in performance with time too. Even with trim. I use WD Black SATA drives and find their performance to be amazing. 100 MB/s plus performance. I can say the WD Black drives were amazing for the price. I use they for quick backups in eSATA enclosures.

I would never place swap or paging on SSD drives. They will devour the drive faster. I have seen SSD drives just fail. I tested them for various manufacturers and found that they do degrade in performance. SSDs are getting better. A lot depends on the money you spend on them. My suggestion always is a great backup solution. Use it and test it.

RAID 1 is best for paging / swapping. For Linux, RAID 10 is great.

My main workstation has SAS RAID in it with 15K Seagate Cheetah SAS drives on a LSI Logic battery backup SAS RAID controller. Server grade. I get 1.097 GB/s cached reads and 850 MB/s cached writes. I do video processing, CAD, and gaming on it. I beat on my hard drives with heavy IOs.

My linux servers run on an HP DL 360e Gen8 server with 7200 RPM SAS drives for now. I have tape drives and eSata drives for backups.

https://wp.scsiraidguru.com is my tech site.

They are Desktop Client even if in some case are quite powerfull. The form factor is not so big and the Ram Available are between 16 and 32 GB, depends on the model. They also have an NVME SSD Disk and a Mechanical Disk(2 or 1 TB)

We are looking for a middle way between performance and making the life of the SSD longer as possibile....

@Giovanni-Baldi NVME will be good for your OS and the HDD for your user data, just keep in mind the paging file/swap file will degrade the performance over time. With the hardware you have mentioned you should be ok.