[Gllug] Cloning only one of two partitions & how necessary is swapspace...

[general_email at technicalbloke.com]

Hi all,

I've just splashed out on a new 32Gb SSD to use as my system drive but
I'm not sure what the implications are of cloning my current system
partition to it...

My current system partition is one of 3 partitions on a 360Gb drive, the
system partition is 30Gb, there's 3Gb for swap and a third partition
(for my home folder) that uses the rest of the space.

If I simply clone the system partition then the disk will be without an
MBR and thus unbootable yes? If I copy the MBR it will point to an
invalid second partition, the consequences of which I don't know but
suspect may be bad. So do I have to copy the MBR then edit/recreate its
partition table by hand somehow? If so some guidance on this would be
appreciated, esp as I'd still like it to point to my home folder on the
original disk. I'm assuming I can get round the sys partition + swap
adding up to 33Gb by shrinking the system partition a little with
gparted as I'm only using half of it anyway.

So does this sound plausible? Within an average evening? If it's a real
pain I might just wait for the next Ubuntu release as was planning a
clean install for that anyway but that would mean having my shiny new
hardware sat on a shelf looking at me for another two weeks!

My other (fairly unimportant and quite possibly already discussed to
death here in the past) question is about swap space. Although I
understand the terrible write endurance of SSDs is rapidly becoming an
myth/anachronism I am curious if there is a downside to running without
swap? I assume I would lose the ability to hibernate if I disable it so
I'll probably keep it, I'm just wondering if anything bad might happen
if I didn't.

Also I'm assuming that modern wear levelling happens beneath the
partition level - spreading erases and writes over the whole storage
space regardless of partition boundaries - otherwise swap partitions on
SSDs would be a very bad idea eh. Please correct me if I'm wrong about
that though - I don't want to toast my lovely new drive by assuming
people made good design choices that they actually didn't!

Cheers,

Roger.
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