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Going to put my home directory on a different partition to my OS (which will be on a SSD). This partition will most likely be on a traditional HDD.

Will this negate the performance increases of the OS on the SSD?

Edit - I'm talking about a linux (Ubuntu) install, not windows!

Edit - My profile is: professional developer, so running multiple IDEs & text editors. No gaming. Some movies & streaming etc. 120gig SSD and 250 gig 7200rpm HDD

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  • This is such a broad question. Consider the following unknowns: your profile of applications, your workloads, your network usage, the types of files, and the size of the files. This is a question with a non deterministic answer.
    – surfasb
    Oct 5, 2011 at 22:25

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I don't think that there would be considerable slowdown. The dotfiles that reside in your home directory should be mostly in the filesystem cache anyway. It matters, though, where your compilation directory is.

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It won't negate the performance increases seen, but it will inevitably cause some aspects of your workflow to slow down.

The Appdata folder in your home directory will likely be the biggest introduction of perfomance loss. Applications store various amounts of information in the appdata folder, and the degree they use them will be proportional to the slowdown you see. For example, Google Chrome installs itself entirely in AppData.

How are you intending to do it? Move it and create a junction from c:\users ? Note that Chrome doesn't work properly via a junction if this is something you use.

I imagine you have decided to do this because your profile is getting so big and sucking up all your precious SSD disk space - but the reason it is getting big is because of the data that resides in it, and most of that data exists for a reason, is used by applications, and will be accessed at the slower rate the hdd delivers.

You'll still get fast boots though!

Perhaps get a copy of windirstat and get a visual view of the space taken up on your ssd - perhaps you can make more targetted decisions.

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  • I'm talking about linux Paul.
    – mwjackson
    Oct 6, 2011 at 18:10
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    Ooops! Much of what is said still applies - Gnome and the application you run all store their info in ~ and once the OS is booted and applications are running, this is where the majority of io will go. Really though, given it is linux and far more straightforward, I would just give it a go and see. You can always symlink some parts back to the ssd if you find certain applications aren't running as fast as you like, without having to put the whole lot on ssd.
    – Paul
    Oct 6, 2011 at 23:01
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Installing the OS on SSD will give you a significant performance boost over a HDD OS + home dir.

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  • Erm - that's what I planned to do? I'm asking if having the OS on SSD and the ~/ on HDD would slow me down?
    – mwjackson
    Oct 6, 2011 at 18:10
  • It won't be slower than all on HDD, but would technically be slower than all on SSD. I'm cheap, and plan on doing exactly what you plan, because I'd need a much smaller SSD. Anything that feel like it starts too slowly, move onto the SSD, although usually they'd be installed there anyway. IMO, SSD for programs, HDD for data, but that's just me.
    – Rob
    Oct 6, 2011 at 18:49

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