Partitoning suggestions for dual NVMe

Hi,

I would appreciate a few pointers on choosing an appropriate partitioning scheme on my new laptop (clevo pc50dd2). I have been a linux user for some 4 years now and I have done manual partition schemes and installer based partitioning schemes on previous centos and fedora installations. I have always used ext4 and lvm in the past.

I have 2 NVMe disks installed (Samsung 970-evo and WD SN550). This is the first laptop I’ve had where I’m purely NVMe.

I’ve seen the phronix reports about performance differences for f2fs c.f. other filesystems (XFS / EXT4 / Btrfs / F2FS / NILFS2 Performance On Linux 5.8 - Phoronix). I’ve also seen some articles talking about the unreliability of f2fs v2 ext4. I want to go with f2fs as I’m now purely NVMe, but I’m concerned about the supposed unreliability

I don’t have extreme use cases. I’m a developer and will mainly be running several vms. I could just continue using the tried and tested ext4, but I do (sometimes) like to try something new! From what I can make out, Btrfs would not be the best choice for NVMe.

TIA

Well, I can tell you how I have setup my system. I run VMs, audio and video editing of all sorts and web authoring. What I have learned is that if you are running Virt-Manager for VM’s (Which I highly recommend), you need to have a separate partition for /var, virt-manager stores the VMs in /var/lib.
The home partition, IMHO, should always be on a separate drive. Also, the root directory should be at least 50Gb.

EXAMPLE:
/boot/efi  (drive 1, partition 1)
/          (drive 1, partition 2)
/var       (drive 1, partition 3)
/home      (drive 2, partition 1)

Number one reason to have /home on a separate drive is in case of system corruption. You can reinstall the OS without formating the /home directory and you are back in business.

For backup, I use Timeshift for the system back up and BackInTime for the user directory.
Be sure your backup drives are large enough for backing up your VMs.

As for the file system type, you will have to make an educated guess… I have been running my two NVME drives in EXT4 with no issues for a year. I also understand that Fedora 33 is shipping with BTRFS…

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@Jade1: If you go with F2FS, make triple sure that your backups actually work. I was burned with F2FS one time, and will not use it again, for any reason.

Thanks for the warning merlock! Out of interest, when were you burned with F2Fs? Was it recently or was it with an older version of F2FS?

Great practical information DeLinuxCo. Thanks!

~ Sep-Oct of 2019.

If you want to use F2FS have a backup strategy implemented and make yourself familiar with the filesystem install options which could make a difference in reliablity. Very nice described here:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/F2FS