How do I Maximize HDD Linux Mint Performance / Storage?

Just got a 3TB Toshiba HDD from the Newegg Shell Shocker. I think my SSD might be bad. Looking to install the most reliable, highest performance partition setup that allows for usage of the full space. But this amount of space is unheard of for me (never had a drive larger than 1TB til now) so...:
1. How do you allocate it? Are extra subpartitions or partitions beyond normal boot/home/root worth it?
2. Is swap space more worth it on an HDD than SSD? I have 16GB of RAM to work with.
3. Any pointers for assigning sectors to maximize the reading and optimize for spin cycles. Is this no longer valid these days like they may have been on the 80GB 4200RPM drives of yesteryear?

Thanks as always!

About 3TB Seagate .....

Dont shoot the messenger man. I just thought you might like to take a look in case it changes your mind about the drive.

As for your actual question I am seriously in the same boat. I recently got a bunch more space then I am used to and have no idea the best way to approach it. Here is what I have done though.... I do not have an ssd so I put the main install on my smallest drive (in this case I believe it was a 320GB) in a 100GB partition. Then in my split all my additional space up into different sizes that were more reasonable (anywhere from 100GB to 1TB). I then created a working directory in /home/yourusernamehere directory and mount whatever partition I need to work on there. If I need more than 1 partition for any length of time I just create another directory and mount another chunk of disk space to it.

As I said, I am not sure what the best way is, but that is how Ive done it. And it works well enough until I find a better way

Edit: Swap is generally told to be equal to your ram, but can be less or more as needed. if you are topping out your ram then look into adding swap. also you can change a value called "swappiness" which will determine how often you use this space and what for

Tyerker said:

Just got a 3TB Toshiba HDD from the Newegg Shell Shocker. I think my SSD might be bad. Looking to install the most reliable, highest performance partition setup that allows for usage of the full space. But this amount of space is unheard of for me (never had a drive larger than 1TB til now) so...:
1. How do you allocate it? Are extra subpartitions or partitions beyond normal boot/home/root worth it?

Click to expand...

For a regular drive, probably not. Back when SSD's were new I had like 7 partitions so that anything that was going constant writes was on a spinning disk to reduce the wear. Anymore I don't think it is worth it

2. Is swap space more worth it on an HDD than SSD? I have 16GB of RAM to work with.

Click to expand...

This is still a matter of debate in the linux community. I roll with either none or something small like 1G just in case there is something I am doing that required more than 16G of ram. I haven't had problems with any of my boxes that roll without swap. That said, my server has 96G of ram and it has like 127G of swap because thats what was allocated. I don't need the space because the data lives elsewhere so meh... If you have the space there isnt a compelling reason not to have swap...

3. Any pointers for assigning sectors to maximize the reading and optimize for spin cycles. Is this no longer valid these days like they may have been on the 80GB 4200RPM drives of yesteryear?

Click to expand...

you can optimize this for sure. There are a few things you need to figure out first. What is the sector size of your hard drive? If it is greater than 512, is it emulating 512 sector size for Windows Vista and lower (I think this is *less* common but drives that do this still exist).

Along with sector size, knowing what file system you are going to use will help you determine the sector off set. Some file systems (like ZFS) are able to figure this out on their own and will leave a few megs at the start of the disk free so that it can align properly. Again, on the whole i think this is mostly unnecessary these days except for those who require the absolute most performance out of a drive. For a single drive and home use, I can't imagine this is really required anymore

knoober said:

About 3TB Seagate .....

Dont shoot the messenger man. I just thought you might like to take a look in case it changes your mind about the drive.

Click to expand...

Thanks for your response. But not sure where the Seagate came from. I bought a Toshiba drive.

I'm sorry about that. I don't know kw where that came from of either then. I read Seagate.

I just redid the partition layout on the SSD in my laptop. I was trying out different distros and really missed having an alternate root partition to use for testing. I moved some stuff to my file server, shrunk my $HOME partition and carved out some space for another root partition. I do that on my desktops and I should have been doing that on my laptop as well. Lesson learned.

I also learned some things about keeping the /home partition and installing something different in /. Desktop settings from one distro can affect other distros. One of the distros I tried was Ubuntu-Mate and it came up w/out a window manager. The indication in .xsession_errors was that some previous configuration setting caused this problem. I can see two solutions to that issue. I could backup and reformat my $HOME directory and selectively restore after the install. That wouldn't work with a multi-distro installation. I think for that I could have a very small /home partition for each distro and then link to another partition for all of directories in $HOME. That way all of the .xxxx.conf files would not be shared between distros but the bulk of my data would. Hmmm... Actually I think it would make more sense to not have a separate /home partition but rather leave that with the boot partition. Instead have a separate data partition that would hold what normally goes into the directories below $HOME.

I'm not sure if this helps you at all but it did help me to think through a better way.