Linux partitioning with SSD and HDD

Question

I bought a SSD to re-install Linux Mint on it and use my old HDD to store my personnal data...This way my computer might run faster.

I will to partition the disks as follow.

/ on SSD
/home on HDD
/var on HDD
/swap on HDD

/var and /swap will be on the HDD so Linux won't write too many times on the SSD.

Should I use this partitioning scheme or should I leave /var on the SSD and mount /var/log in tmpfs with a limited size so it will use swap if /var/log gets full.

This is a laptop computer used for web browing and digital picture editing (gimp, darktable).

Are there any other /var/xxx dirs to mount in tmpfs ?

Beside this I will also tweak Linux to not warite too many times on the SSD.

Answer 1

Its good to let the entire /var in the hdd. There are several /var directories that are regularly written beyond /var/log, for example cups can put jobs in /var/spool, apt package manager put downloaded packages in /var/cache and install info in /var/lib. The definition of /var is a directory to hold VARiable data.

PS: add noatime flag in your ext4 filesystems to speedup you HDD and avoid writes in your SSD.