Partitioning notebook with dual boot and 2 SSD

I have a new Lenovo T530.

I plan to set it up with 2 SSD drives, both mounted in the computer before I load any OS software.

With a 2.5" boot drive of Win7/64_Pro 512GB M4 SSD, with ~410GB allocated as 1 NTFS boot partition via Gparted, and 102GB not allocated for better long term performance.

I plan to 1st do a fresh install of Win7/64_Pro to the 2.5" boot SSD. Both SSD units will be in the computer (and already partitioned via Gparted) when I install Win7, so that nothing will get screwed up if I were to make the mistake of trying to physically add the mSATA SSD later on.

The 2nd SSD device is 256GB M4 mSATA SSD, I'm likely going to try setting up the laptop with a dual boot of Win7 and some flavor of Linux. Partitioning for the mSATA SSD might be something like this:
1 primary NTFS partition ~50GB
1 primary FAT32 partition ~60GB
1 primary EXT3 partition ~80GB
1 Linux swap partition ~17GB (intended for "sleep" since I've got 16GB of memory on the machine)
unallocated space ~49GB

MBR for partitioning (as opposed to the newer GPT which doesn't seem to get used much by real world laptop users), and AHCI as the choice for SATA (as opposed to the older compatibility mode).

Main thing I'm undecided about is whether I really need/want a swap partition.

I've seen that different Linux distros save actual memory differently when the computer is put into sleep or hibernate mode.

The Linux distros that I'm considering are (in alphabetical order):
Debian Linux
Mint Linux
Scientific Linux
Ubuntu Linux

FWIW it's been 10 years since I last worked with Unix (command line, very little GUI). So I'm probably looking for whichever of these 1) has good driver support for a very new Lenovo T530, and 2) is reasonably user friendly.

Am I correct in thinking that Scientific Linux is the least user friendly?

One other thing (and NOT a small concern) is whether grub now works OK with a dual boot of Win7 and any of the above distros?

 

I would rate Ubuntu as the easiest because it's fairly easy to use and has a great community. Mint is based on Ubuntu and is not much harder to use, the community is just not quite as mature. I've never heard of Scientific Linux. The only reason you'd want GPT partitions is if you wanted to use uEFI boot for Windows, because it only supports GPT or if you need to boot from a partition > 2TB. If you're installing Linux I would recommend MBR because GPT support for Linux is not quite where it needs to be yet. I haven't had a problem with using GRUB and Windows 7 together.

 

That's a great comment, thanks.

Both Scientific Linux and CentOS appear to be the low cost (read free for the OS, or nearly free) variants of Red Hat Linux. See the current NBR thread: http://forum.notebookreview.com/lin...ware/695280-enterprise-linux-suggestions.html

Boot HDD that are > 2TB don't yet seem to have reached critical mass.

But it won't be long.

Does the Win8 "secure boot" thing need UEFI?

If Win8 gets off the ground (and that's still an if), then maybe we'll see serious movement away from MBR.

You're the 1st I've actually seen say that GRUB now plays nice with dual boot of Win7 and Linux; I kinda suspected it, but a lot of searching in this forum didn't turn up any flat out statements.

e.g. is it really a good idea to have a swap partition on a SSD?

Every time that I put the laptop into sleep mode and/or hibernate mode that swap area will be written to?

Which may be bad for the SSD's longevity?

Perhaps better might be to define a 17GB swap file for use on the EXT3 partition?

One other question is if using EXT4 might be a better choice than EXT3?

I see that EXT4 became "stable" on 21 October 2008 and maybe 4 years is enough time for related software to adapt to EXT4?

See: ext4 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

FWIW I came across this "Top Ten Linux Distributions" with short comments at: DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.