Need advice on partitioning hybrid drive ssd on lenovo y500

[LacNaan]

I'm in the "preparing the disks" stage, and unsure how to partition the 16GB SSD hybrid-drive cache. I tried asking on irc, and got a handful of suggestions of what I could do, but none of them seemed viable for a first time user.

I'm guessing the safest/simplest method of attack would be to make the whole SSD a swap partition? Should I avoid making the ESP on the SSD as well?

Full specs of machine can be found here: https://www.newegg.com/black-lenovo-ideapad-y500-mainstream/p/N82E16834318552

[pietinger]

LacNaan,

Welcome to Gentoo Forums !

Before you can make any recommendations, you need to know what you want to use in the future. Example: Hibernation. If you want this, your swap partition should be at least 12 GB (preferably 16 GB) with your 8 GB main memory. So I can recommend in good conscience that you use the 16GB SSD for the swap partition. But if you don't want hibernation, you should consider which data you want/need to access most frequently. I would then use the SSD for this. You can put the ESP on the hard disk, as it is only accessed once: at system startup (okay; additional access is also possible when you install a new version of the boot manager, but this is rather rare ).

[LacNaan]

The proposals were not feasible because I'm new and unfamiliar with everything being suggested. I'm grasping at straws, but iirc, it was suggested that I try to put /var and /usr on the ssd, but this was also going to require doing some rare LVM config with cache striping or something.

That probably sounds ridiculous but hopefully gives some insight on why I gave up on the irc and came here. I'm an idiot and everything suggested I could barely understand, much less execute (I don't even know what they meant by /var)


I'm going to try making the whole SSD a swap partition and make an additional 16GB Swap partition on the HDD since it's yuge(1TB total). Probably not efficient, but I just want to get past step 9. Hibernation would be a big accomplishment as well, but long way to go first.

Thank you for the help boss!

[pietinger]