Partition Advice - 1 TB Seagate External HD

[gatoruss]

Thank you. I appreciate your time. I hope to do the install tonight.

BTW, I have been playing around some with an install of 12.10 on a 16 GB USB flash drive. The performance isn't as bad I initially thought - this morning was able to install the Citrix Receiver on the flash drive and log into my work network. That could be handy if i am away from home (travelling) and don't have my laptop. Anyhow, I am hoping that the external USB hard drive will be an improvement as far as speed and performance...I am excited to find out. Do you know offhand if 12.10 is compatable with USB 3.0?

[oldfred]

I have 12.04 full install in 8GB on my 16GB flash drive with another 8GB for data. While not speedy it is functional. Did you make the changes like an SSD to reduce writes as that slows down everything. With a fair amount of RAM once an app has loaded it is just as fast as a hard drive as Linux is good about cacheing everything into RAM.

There used to be some issues with USB3, but I think that was the BIOS not anything else. I just bought a 32GB USB3 flash, but only have USB2 ports and want to see if I can tell any difference. Supposedly the flash drive itself is better.

[gatoruss]

Did you make the changes like an SSD to reduce writes as that slows down everything.

Can you elaborate? I do not follow what you are suggesting.

[oldfred]

Flash drives do not support trim, but all the other settings are similar. I believe I did these on both my flash & SSD.

With SSD or Flash drives, Use ext4 without journal:
sudo tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sda1
sudo tune2fs -o discard /dev/sda1
No swap or set swapiness or install 'Dynamic Swap Space Manager' from the Ubuntu Software Center
After installing, change the fstab so that everything gets mounted with noatime.
Make sure BIOS is in AHCI mode for trim to work.
change to noop i/o scheduler

I have seen some newer info on scheduler but did not save that info. But the default one is really for rotating hard drives. I did not use swap on flash drive as I have 4GB of RAM and never see swap used the way I normally work. With flash drive I do not try to load lots of programs at once, just in case.