I have no experience installing Ubuntu and need some help.
My laptop, a Lenovo z500, has a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD with 8GB of RAM.
When installing, which option should I use: “Erase Disk and install Ubuntu”, or “Other” (manual partitioning)?
My goal is to have the best performance. What is your suggestion to install on these two drives?
Generally you want to install your operating system on the faster drive. If you install your OS on a slow drive you'll find it will severely bottleneck your machine, even if you have a very good CPU and plenty of RAM.
The decision to erase either disk is dependant on if you want to keep using windows or not. If your drive still has around 30-60+ GB of free space and you still want to be able to use your old operating system i'd recommend dual booting.
The Solid-State Disk (SSD) should have faster read and write times than the Hard Disk Drive (HDD). It is a smaller disk (as would be expected), but 128GB is plenty for installing an operating system such as Ubuntu.
If you do not want any other operating system installed in parallel with Ubuntu (a Dual Boot system), then using Erase Disk and install Ubuntu onto the 128GB SSD would result in a faster boot sequence than installing on the 1TB HDD. If that is the sort of performance you are looking for, then that should be pretty straight-forward.
The 1TB HDD could be mounted on a suitable directory as a data disk if you need to store lots of large datafiles (movies, large databases, etc.)
Without knowing what you want to use it for, it is hard to give detailed recommendations about "best performance". Do you do use programs that do lots of disk access? Lots of internet access? Lots of calculations in memory? Each of those use-cases has different requirements to give "best performance". I've tried to show what my assumptions are when providing options in this answer. I hope this helps :-)
