Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Hello to all

I was given an "Acer Aspire M3970G" computer with some of the specs:
Intel Core i5-2320 CPU @ 3.00GHz
16 GB DDR3 Memory
AMD Radeon HD 7350
BIOS Vendor: American Megatrends Inc

which has a very slow, 1TB-seagate HDD, that I am wanting to replace with a "Crucial MX500 500GB Internal SSD" drive.

I plan on installing only "Puppys", running Fossapup64 as the default-OS, boot-mgr-Grug4Dos, with another or so pups to work on the other pups.

Usually, I make two partitions (on hdd)>
1) sda1 about 30MB Ext3 for the pups(/mnt/home)
2) sda2 Ext3 for the remainder of the space, for data storage

Do I need to make a swap-partition on this SSD, what with having 16 GB RAM?

I am hoping to hear some partitioning advice/options along with the type of filesystem(s) you would format this SSD with.

This Acer box is currently running very well and fast on a Cruzer-glide USB-2.0 stick,atm.

Thanks for any advice, feedback or other suggestions...

bliss, festus

You should not need swap space, unless you want to hibernate.

You can create a swap file any time. a swap file works about as well as a swap partition.
You can create, delete, move, copy the file, just like any other file, any time you want ( swapoff first.)

This would create a 16G swap file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/home/swapfile bs=1M count=16000
mkswap /mnt/home/swapfile
swapon /mnt/home/swapfile

Even if you wanted to use swap space, it usually can be much smaller than 16GiB.
I used a 256MiB swap file for a while, just as an experiment. It almost always used no (zero) swap space.
Once, it used about 100MiB of swap.

I think I would avoid using swap space on a SSD, anyway.

@williams2
Thanks for the reply and the swap file info.

It is acceptable to partition an internal ssd, isn't it?
I have read somewhere that it decreases its performance to do so.

Anyway, I guess I'll partition it my usual way.

Thanks again, and have a great day...

bliss, festus

@festus :-

I'd grab your SSD while you can, mate.

The upcoming "Chia" cryptocurrency, which will open for transactions in a few days time, is based around use of storage rather than GPUs. The prediction is that there will very soon be a storage "shortfall", in much the same way that cryptocurrency 'miners' have buggered-up the GPU market.

You have been warned.....

Mike.

mikewalsh wrote: ↑Fri Apr 30, 2021 12:34 pm

@festus :-

I'd grab your SSD while you can, mate...
Mike.

Thanks for the advice, mike.

I ordered the ssd, SATA-to-USB cable, etc, a short while ago, and it should arrive May 4th.

Thanks for the feedback

bliss, festus

Hi festus,

About the only thing I can add to the partitioning question is if you are going to run/explore both 64-and-32 bit Puppys you might want to consider keeping each architecture on a separate partition. Having a bunch of portables applications isn't much of a problem: being portables they can be anywhere and at any level. I place all 64-bits in a folder named Pup-Apps; 32-bits in a folder named pup-apps. Both folders bookmarked. But SFSes which are not version specific are best located at /mnt/home. Over time the accumulated SFSes make finding the one you want time-consuming whether sought visually or via SFS-load.

Maybe its time for me to do some spring cleaning.