On 08/12/2021 14:27, Jorge P. de Morais Neto wrote: I understand you have one SATA 2.5" slot in your laptop and one NVMe slot, and you want to utilize them both. My post below work on this assumption.
For backups, I would continue my weekly manual backups to my 1.5 TB external HDD with duplicity.
On the SSD I intend to leave 35 GB unpartitioned for extra over provisioning. It would have just one 215 GB partition.
Leave more overprovisioning if you can. Use Btrfs with zstd compression for your / and /home, you will gain many gigabytes.
On the HDD I would put a 34 GB swap partition at the beginning, then a 215 GB partition for RAID1 with the SSD, then a 751 GB partition.
This doesn't make any sense. Don't run RAID1 SSD+HDD. You will kill all gains SSD NVMe provides. 1TB 2.5" are totally slow and it will kill your productivity. You may as well not be buying any NVMe if you are to use it with RAID1 with spinning rust. Just run even hourly, or daily, backups, rsyncs, or whatever tool you want to use, but don't run them online as RAID1 together.
intend to put Debian system*and* /home on the 215 GB RAID1, but I would set all the XDG user dirs² on the 751 GB HDD partition
If I were you, I'd do as follows: / on NVMe Btrfs noatime,nodiratime,space_cache=v2,ssd,compress-force=zstd:6,subvol=@ /home on NVMe Btrfs noatime,nodiratime,space_cache=v2,ssd,compress-force=zstd:6,subvol=@home /home/user/folder - that would be whatever is really big and you can't fit it in SSD /home - make it your Videos, Steam games, your storage-hungry app - put that as: HDD noatime,nodiratime,space_cache=v2,compress-force=zstd:6,subvol=@hddfolder1 and mount that in fstab as your /home/user/folder That way you have small /, bigger /home, both on SSD, and massive, specific folders on HDD. Everything with compression on the fly. If you have very slow CPU, decrease zstd compression to 3. If you really need battery life, and don't want any extra CPU cycles, disable it. Do the rest as you please, swap, tmp etc. Configure daily, weekly, hourly rsync to copy everything on / and /home to HDD separate partitions. That way if you NVMe dies you can plug new one, copy everything back to it and start again. Another option (I wouldn't do it, but here you go) is to replace 1TB HDD for 1TB SSD. You can pair it with NVMe, it will be slower a bit, but not that slow like RAID1 NVMe+HDD setup would be. -- With kindest regards, Piotr. ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian - The universal operating system ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ https://www.debian.org/ ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
