[SOLVED] Checking setup of Dual Boot partitions on SSD&HDD

[bmickey]

Hello, I have a Dell Inspiron 7577 and I have Debian and Windows installed on it. Both the root directory for Debian and the C drive for Windows share the NVMe SSD, and the home directory, swap partition, and extra storage for windows are on the HDD.

I am a firm believer in reading the fine manual and my setup has been running without a hitch for a while now but I just wanted to check with the more experienced that I did everything correctly because sometimes I'm overwhelmed by the amount of things I don't know about Linux.

There's some things I'm not sure about like whether I left enough storage for over provisioning (or whether that's fully necessary). To setup my system I followed the doc,
https://wiki.debian.org/SSDOptimization
https://wiki.debian.org/fstab

Also what is the official deal with swap. I have 16GB of ram so I know from a memory perspective that's more than necessary but do I need virtual memory for programming in C?

Here is my /etc/fstab:

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brian@debian:~$ nano /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p7 during installation
UUID=ca18d8b0-4e4d-4a67-a7b0-635e4939d040 /               ext4   relatime,errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during installation
UUID=FE23-26D5  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
# /home was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=99d48a0b-6526-4e04-b5b2-1875627c4a20 /home           ext4    defaults,relatime        0       2
# swap was on /dev/sda2 during installation
UUID=0d809cfd-4de3-4779-808c-857ea563cbda none            swap    sw              0       0

The SSD is 256 GB and the HDD is 1TB

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brian@debian:~$ lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda           8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
├─sda1        8:1    0 465.7G  0 part /home
├─sda2        8:2    0  14.9G  0 part [SWAP]
└─sda3        8:3    0 390.6G  0 part 
nvme0n1     259:0    0 238.5G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1    0   500M  0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2    0   128M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p3 259:3    0 124.7G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p4 259:4    0   839M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p5 259:5    0  13.6G  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p6 259:6    0   1.1G  0 part 
└─nvme0n1p7 259:7    0  93.1G  0 part /

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brian@debian:~$ blkid
/dev/nvme0n1: PTUUID="0e1899c9-10ee-46f3-af9a-00c8d4cd329a" PTTYPE="gpt"
/dev/nvme0n1p1: LABEL="ESP" UUID="FE23-26D5" TYPE="vfat" PARTLABEL="EFI system partition" PARTUUID="6d4b5f27-3262-4691-a308-d49810e4ce9d"
/dev/nvme0n1p2: PARTLABEL="Microsoft reserved partition" PARTUUID="2912c7bc-c2a6-4b26-af05-f2bcb112bd94"
/dev/nvme0n1p3: UUID="8E287A78287A5EE1" TYPE="ntfs" PARTLABEL="Basic data partition" PARTUUID="75fd58ad-842e-4a03-ad63-f6d46bf145ae"
/dev/nvme0n1p4: UUID="C60884DB0884CC3D" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="dde02da8-715d-481a-a95f-330a914f596b"
/dev/nvme0n1p5: LABEL="Image" UUID="F430C8E030C8AB46" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="12e7bd73-c060-49c5-b190-68d2798c6d1c"
/dev/nvme0n1p6: LABEL="DELLSUPPORT" UUID="3C5C21C95C217F30" TYPE="ntfs" PARTUUID="7c08d8d5-9886-44d3-8589-4da233b1de0a"
/dev/nvme0n1p7: UUID="ca18d8b0-4e4d-4a67-a7b0-635e4939d040" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="31099fb9-ae66-446f-93fc-70dd118861d2"
/dev/sda1: UUID="99d48a0b-6526-4e04-b5b2-1875627c4a20" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="e613bb21-9a99-4f26-8653-833a9b2010d0"
/dev/sda2: UUID="0d809cfd-4de3-4779-808c-857ea563cbda" TYPE="swap" PARTUUID="47b87bb4-15e5-4235-829c-0238d35c19be"
/dev/sda3: LABEL="Data" UUID="B2EE168CEE1648CD" TYPE="ntfs" PARTLABEL="Basic data partition" PARTUUID="ca9bb2d2-b6ed-4f3e-ad88-183695dc41aa"

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[CwF]

Also what is the official deal with swap. I have 16GB of ram so I know from a memory perspective that's more than necessary but do I need virtual memory for programming in C.

If you hibernate then you need 16+GB swap. If you don't then 4-8 is likely fine. Just watch it for awhile and see if you get into it or not. You can adjust the swappiness to your liking. If your pattern does induce some swap usage, swappiness will adjust the degree of use. My own pattern does use a small swap even with as much as half the ram free, and it seems more stable with it than without. Right now with not much going on it's at 12 of 32 in use with 353 MB swapped, 8GB avaialable. ? Weird, I leave it alone. I do have machines with no swap with different usage patterns that do fine.

I choose willful ignorance on the SSD's, or say the fears are overblown. With a long history of high altitude use and losing consumer grade harddrives every few years I switched to SSD's long ago when OS's where ignorant of the differences. I've never treated them as anything but a hard drive. After the first one passed five years issue free, now 9 and still going, I declared it a non-issue. Out of 8 or so since I've had issues with 2, both the same brand and issues came quickly, the others still doing fine. With that said I don't typically fill them up or write GB/day everyday. So I think you'll be fine.

[bmickey]

Also what is the official deal with swap. I have 16GB of ram so I know from a memory perspective that's more than necessary but do I need virtual memory for programming in C.

If you hibernate then you need 16+GB swap. If you don't then 4-8 is likely fine. Just watch it for awhile and see if you get into it or not. You can adjust the swappiness to your liking. If your pattern does induce some swap usage, swappiness will adjust the degree of use. My own pattern does use a small swap even with as much as half the ram free, and it seems more stable with it than without. Right now with not much going on it's at 12 of 32 in use with 353 MB swapped, 8GB avaialable. ? Weird, I leave it alone. I do have machines with no swap with different usage patterns that do fine.

I choose willful ignorance on the SSD's, or say the fears are overblown. With a long history of high altitude use and losing consumer grade harddrives every few years I switched to SSD's long ago when OS's where ignorant of the differences. I've never treated them as anything but a hard drive. After the first one passed five years issue free, now 9 and still going, I declared it a non-issue. Out of 8 or so since I've had issues with 2, both the same brand and issues came quickly, the others still doing fine. With that said I don't typically fill them up or write GB/day everyday. So I think you'll be fine.

Thank you for sharing your experience with SSD's.
With your setup, do you have fstrim enabled or something else you use?

My system literally never uses swap and honestly it never uses much more then 2.7GB of RAM. The only reason I included it is because I wasn't sure if I needed it for C which honestly I doubt and also in case I wanted to enable hibernation.

As of now I do not have hibernation enabled.
It would be nice but I think the way I have it setup could cause some problems because its on the HDD and in fstab the HDD is set to <pass> 2 so the image would never get loaded into RAM before the root partition was mounted.

Also if you don't mind me asking which brand of SSD failed you?

[CwF]

nothing, as said no special care at all. As I was saying, I haven't come up with a problem to fix. When it becomes default, great, I'll leave that to the experts. Ever since I learned to image disk I gave up on monitoring disk, and I'm an old school scsi guy.. All those disk I've lost, I've never lost data. This is not to say another use case, like a laptop, doesn't warrant doing what you can. But on an easier maintenance desktop the best method is another disk with some backup method of choice.

I won't criticize the company since I like their video cards, and they make cool little computers, but rebranding some generic third party was bogus. But at half samsung price I bit. I have samsungs and sandisk without issue. I still use those two Z's for read only storage to off load stuff from the os host disk which some vm's use. Their symptom was to periodically flip to read only while in use. Upon reboot they would maybe have a bad superblock which would fix up fine and then report healthy. The 4th or 5th time it happened during OS use I imaged to a samsung and went on with life, hasn't happened since.

Overall, if you have it working well I'd call it good. Next time around, without hibernation, I'd likely skip a swap partition, set swappiness to 10, and allow a swap file instead

[bmickey]

Well thank you for your help. I feel much more at ease.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

I run fstrim.service (via a .timer) on my SSDs but I'm pretty sure the firmware of the drives do a similar thing automatically.

For some reason Debian doesn't activate it automatically, for a change:

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# apt install util-linux
# cp /usr/share/doc/util-linux/examples/fstrim.{timer,service} /etc/systemd/system
# systemctl enable --now fstrim.timer