Hi,

I’ve been running Linux for some time, currently on Nobara and happy. Running it on a 1TB NVME, and a second 1TB NVME drive for extra storage for games, etc., both at gen 3.

I find myself running out of room and just picked up 2TB and 1TB NVME drives, both gen 4, and am thinking as to what the best partition layout would be. The 2x1TB gen 3 will be moved to my NAS as a cache pool.

The PC is used for gaming, photo/video editing and web development.

I guess options would be:

  1. OS on 2TB, and the 1TB for extra storage, call it a day.
  2. OS on 1TB, and the 2TB for extra storage
  3. Divy up the 1TB to have a partition for /, another for /home and another for /var and maybe another for games, then on the 2TB have one big partition for games and scratch disk for videos.
  4. Same as option 3 but swap the drives around.

What would YOU do in this situation? I’m leaning towards option 3 or a variation there of, as it gives versatility to hop to a new distro if I want relatively easy, and one big partition for game storage/video scratch.

My mobo only supports 2xNVME drives unfortunately (regret not spending an extra $60-70 on a better one), but I have a USB-C NVME enclosure that I might use with a a spare 1TB that will be removed from the NAS.

Any thoughts?

Edit: sorry forgot to reply. Thank you all for the input, this was great information and I took a deep dive researching some solutions. I ended up just keeping it simple and went with option 2, with the 1TB as the OS drive and 2TB as additional storage, no additional partitions.

  • patatahooligan@lemmy.world
    6·
    1 year ago

    I hate partitions. Moving and resizing partitions is not fun if you don’t correctly predict exactly the amount of space you need. If you really want the modularity, use btrfs subvolumes instead. IMPORTANT: While it is definitely feasible, ability to retain subvolumes might depend on the distro installer! Check before you commit to this approach!

    Also, consider using LVM or multi-device btrfs to make the drives act as one filesystem. This means that you will never have to worry about where to place your files to balance the load, but it might make removing/replacing a drive in the future harder.