Best practice for splitting data between a fast and slow drive
If I had a fast drive (SSD) and a slow one (HDD), what parts of my Linux system should go on the fast one?
1 answer
First, consider your needs. There's a decent chance that everything you want will fit on the SSD anyway, at least if you aren't an enthusiastic multimedia collector. Nowadays a 1TB SSD can be had cheaply and is likely a much better value for money than a 500GB one; and drives smaller than that are somewhat hard to find as the technology has marched on. (If you're using an NVMe SSD on a laptop, the equation may change.)
On the flip side of that, Linux generally installs offline from an image that fits on a 4GB microSD card (or a single-layer DVD) and absolutely (from personal experience) can be kept running smoothly while fitting everything except /home (and possibly some archived log files) in a 16GB partition (although not everyone will want a separate partition, and your distro may well recommend allocating more space than that - this is especially assuming that you don't plan to install a lot of applications).
If you really insist, only /etc really needs to be on the main partition to have a bootable system, assuming a reasonably modern system. (You'd probably also want an SSD partition for either /boot or /boot/efi). However, while you might have a system that boots quickly by having just this much on an SSD, you'll be much better served if larger components of the OS (such as, say, the desktop environment) can be loaded quickly. There's really no practical benefit to obsessing over this kind of minimalism. Even if you want to set up multiple distros side by side, they won't be able to share a whole lot with each other (setting up a common /usr/local might be worthwhile, but that's more about neatness than saving disk space.)
So rather than designating your HDD as representing a specific part of the Linux filesystem, think of it as a place to keep large, seldom-used files irrespective of that filesystem. That might include video files (i.e. part of what you might otherwise hold in /home subdirectories) and backups (it's good to have your backup on separate physical media anyway). I like to keep Timeshift backups of the OS on my SSD (in a non-user folder in /home), and periodically rsync them (and other specific files I might want to keep backed up) to an external HDD. (Other distros will have similar tools, of course.)
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