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I have a dual disk setup on my Ubuntu 14.04 system: an SSD for / and a 1TB hard drive for /home. Booting is fast but initial operation of the computer, for the first few minutes, is really slow. The first time I launch the Unity dash and search for an application, it can take a minute before the results appear. The next time it will be more or less instant. Loading Nautilus and displaying all my files is also slow on the first run. Arthur Hale It sounds like the problem is with your hard drive rather than your solid state drive – if it’s nearly full it could be fragmented. The system boots from the SSD quickly and loads the desktop from the SSD quickly. Then it has to load files from your hard drive and the slowness starts. After the first run, the information it needs is cached so you then get back your normal performance. The main culprit is probably the Unity dash, and if that is accessing the hard drive then other things that need to read it, like Nautilus scanning for files, will also be affected. You will probably see a lot of hard drive activity at this point, and possibly also be able to hear the stepper motors on the drive frantically moving the heads around.

The simple solution is to reduce the amount of search information collected by the Dash. Go into the Security & Privacy section of System Settings and under the Search tab, turn off ‘Include online search results’. Then go to the Files & Applications tab, press ‘Clear Usage Data’ and then turn off ‘Record file and application’ usage.

Using an SSD for the system gives fast program loading, but then you drop back to hard drive speeds for accessing all your data, which can make a big difference with programs that cache settings and data in multiple files. You would get much better performance by putting /home on the SSD too, but then you will lose out on all that space on the hard drive. One solution is to mount the hard drive within your home directory ( seeMount Pointsbox,p93) and then store your large files within this directory. Moving your videos, photos and music folders onto this drive may well be sufficient and, if you still want to access them from their previous location. For example, if you mount your hard drive at ~/bigstuff, you can move Pictures into it and then do $ ln -s bigstuff/Pictures Pictures which will enable you to see your photos in ~/Pictures. It’s a little more work setting up your system this way but the speed difference can be significant. For example, email programs work so much faster with their caches on an SSD.