What should I do with free disk space?

Arthurbow

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Hi, I installed linux not so long ago, I have 250GB space on my labtop I use 140GB on partition 4 and 40GB on partition 6 and now I got 60GB left
what should I do about it? mix it with partition 6 or create new partition
 


Welcome to the forums
save it till you need it
 
You could merge it with your main OS partition, as that's kinda small. You'll likely run out of room fairly quickly with just 140 GB. Or, if you have one backup go wrong/one wrong command, you'll potentially fill that space up fairly quickly.

I'm a big fan of 'more is better', at least when it comes to drive space.

Remember to make a backup before you go mucking about with partitions. Things can go pear shaped pretty quickly.
 
Arthurbow, if what you have shown as your filesystem is the whole of it, you have no swap partition. There's differing opinions on the need for swap, but to be on the safer side, the creation of one the size of your RAM (or 1.5x or even 2x) may be helpful depending on how you use your system. Some applications may actually make use of swap even when it's not strictly necessary by the system, and that makes those apps and the system run more efficiently, and additionally, you can adjust "swappiness" to tell the system how much to use it. If you create a swap partition, the rest of the free space can be either added to existing partitions, or simply formatted and mounted as an extra partition with an entry in /etc/fstab to make it automatically available on boot.
 
@osprey: I've seen it said that with today's higher-capacity RAM, the 1x-2x swap rule no longer is applicable. Simply adding a few gigabytes should be sufficient swap, if you need it at all. In fact, systems that have 16+ GB of RAM (or even 8+, depending on your use case) and systems that only have SSDs should probably not need swap at all.
 
@osprey: I've seen it said that with today's higher-capacity RAM, the 1x-2x swap rule no longer is applicable. Simply adding a few gigabytes should be sufficient swap, if you need it at all. In fact, systems that have 16+ GB of RAM (or even 8+, depending on your use case) and systems that only have SSDs should probably not need swap at all.
I do not use a swap either here is my Gparted as you can see only two

1.png
 
The point was made that opinions differ on the matter of swap. There's plenty of debate available online. From my perspective, if a user's use case is reasonably predictable and they have enough RAM to cover those activities, then functioning is unlikely to be affected if they exclude a swap partition. If over time, however, for example, a user's activities gather more RAM intensive processing, then swap may come into it's own. In the latter example, say the user developed an interest in creating virtual machines which make greater use of RAM. Swap is slow, but if you are using RAM near its limits, swap can get rid of unused memory, that is, pages in memory that are not active for current processes can be moved out, which then makes more RAM available for the user's activities. Users have to best decide these matters themselves based on how they use their computers. In relation to the actual size of RAM, I understand that hibernating on laptops uses swap, which suggests a swap size the size of RAM, but I don't use that function so can't say more.
 
The point was made that opinions differ on the matter of swap. There's plenty of debate available online. From my perspective, if a user's use case is reasonably predictable and they have enough RAM to cover those activities, then functioning is unlikely to be affected if they exclude a swap partition. If over time, however, for example, a user's activities gather more RAM intensive processing, then swap may come into it's own. In the latter example, say the user developed an interest in creating virtual machines which make greater use of RAM. Swap is slow, but if you are using RAM near its limits, swap can get rid of unused memory, that is, pages in memory that are not active for current processes can be moved out, which then makes more RAM available for the user's activities. Users have to best decide these matters themselves based on how they use their computers. In relation to the actual size of RAM, I understand that hibernating on laptops uses swap, which suggests a swap size the size of RAM, but I don't use that function so can't say more.
I do not use the hibernate function either hence I do not use swap, but I do run 16GBs of RAM on my laptop
 
They could possibly be using a swapfile. That doesn't show up as its own partition, but it is functionally pretty much the same.

If they don't have a swapfile, and want one, the link will help 'em out.
 
They could possibly be using a swapfile. That doesn't show up as its own partition, but it is functionally pretty much the same.

If they don't have a swapfile, and want one, the link will help 'em out.
1.png


If you create it in Gparted it shows or using the Refracta Installer it also shows, I do not know about Calamares since I do not use that installer
 
View attachment 13889

If you create it in Gparted it shows or using the Refracta Installer it also shows, I do not know about Calamares since I do not use that installer

That is neat! I've never seen a swapfile show up like that. Here's one with a swapfile - and are you sure that's a swapfile and not swap on its own partition?

-dev-sda - GParted_001.png


On that box you also have:

Selection_078.png


But, that's a swapfile and not a swap partition.
 
A Swap Partition instead of Swap File

Ah, I thought so. Like mentioned above, if they were using a swapfile we'd not be able to see it as it's not a partition. They could run the 'free' command and find out. These days, I hardly ever bother with a swap partition. I do still use a swapfile, however. Even if I have gobs of RAM, swap is still available.
 
I have one partition on my 500GB SSD created by the installer...at the moment there's 200GB of free space.
m01101.gif


This space will go up and down without any problems...it's important to remember that you must have at least 20% of free space for everything to run efficiently. As for Swap...since Linux Mint 19 a Swap File has been in place as a Swap partition is no longer needed...just add more RAM.
m0114.gif
 
bob466 wrote:
As for Swap...since Linux Mint 19 a Swap File has been in place as a Swap partition is no longer needed...just add more RAM.
Certainly if the swap file suits and works, there is no issue, and more RAM can eschew the need for any swap. But it's worth noting that swap files are significantly slower than swap partitions, and that's due in part to the way the linux filesystem handles files which are not always, nor necessarily, contiguous on the hardware. That means that the operating system may have to "hunt" for the relevant data over various hardware locations. There's an efficiency cost to that which is paid less in a partition which is contiguous.
 
The point was made that opinions differ on the matter of swap. There's plenty of debate available online. From my perspective, if a user's use case is reasonably predictable and they have enough RAM to cover those activities, then functioning is unlikely to be affected if they exclude a swap partition. If over time, however, for example, a user's activities gather more RAM intensive processing, then swap may come into it's own. In the latter example, say the user developed an interest in creating virtual machines which make greater use of RAM. Swap is slow, but if you are using RAM near its limits, swap can get rid of unused memory, that is, pages in memory that are not active for current processes can be moved out, which then makes more RAM available for the user's activities. Users have to best decide these matters themselves based on how they use their computers. In relation to the actual size of RAM, I understand that hibernating on laptops uses swap, which suggests a swap size the size of RAM, but I don't use that function so can't say more.
Alright, I think I will go with swap because I have 4 GB ram and just open browser it's already use 2GB of ram, think it might help. thanks everyone(all storage I have in my labtop is 255gb of ssd and I plan to buy external hard disk for more storage in the future)
 
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