So, basically I’d like to replace the /home with different hard drives. I have a 4tb one that I’m using for videos, a 1tb I’m using for audio files and video games (not the actual game installed there but for example executables or ROMs), and a 500gb I’m using for texts and images. My idea would be to not have the /documents folder and so on and have a drive for everything. Can I do this?
You can absolutely mount those drives at the correct path, make sure your user has the correct permitions. Add them to fstab so they are mounted at boot. Done.
With linux you don’t have drives, at least not in a sense that you’d have in Windows with C:, D:…
You absolutely can have /dev/sda as your operating system drive, /dev/sdb1 mounted on /home/nomad/Documents, /dev/sdc1 mounted on /home/nomad/Videos and so on. Or use whatever names you wish. I had this kind of setup for years before changing the whole hardware with drives big enough to hold all the data (and a NAS, but that’s another topic).
Another option is to use LVM which allows you to manage available storage space more flexible, but that will mix your data across multiple drives even if they have separate volumes (roughly equivalent to traditional partitions).
And no matter which option you choose remember to have backups (and test that they work) since all the hardware will eventually fail.
If getting into LVM, I highly recommend going the extra mile and going ZFS. You have as many mounts as you want with pretty much any parameters you could want, encryption, case insensitive, compression, you name it. And if you end up really needing a partition, vdevs gives you that, and they only take the space that’s actually used. So if you make a vdev for a VM and the VM uses discard/fstrim, it releases all that space back to the host transparently.
I’ve had so many weird problems with LVM especially mirrors and raid. Even snapshots are kinda bleh. I’d take btrfs subvolumes over LVM. It’s barely any more flexible than a regular partition table…
Are any of these an SSD? Because you will definitely feel it if you move your home from an SSH to an HDD. Especially browsers and such, things will start up much more slowly.
I’d recommend keeping home on an SSD and optionally moving all the folders to an HDD if you wish, but at least keep dotfiles on an SSD if you have one.
There’s a lot of options for shuffling things around on Linux with symlinks and bind mounts.
You can move the default folders like “Music” “Photos” and “Videos” or whatever to any location you’d like. I personally have my /home on a small ssd and on a separate large ssd I have a shared partition with windows with all my other stuff. I mounted that partition to /mnt/Storage or whatever and just mapped all my stuff to that partition, like pictures to /mnt/Storage/Pictures
what you want to do is create links in documents to point to the hard drives.
You can try starting here https://www.howtogeek.com/287014/how-to-create-and-use-symbolic-links-aka-symlinks-on-linux/
There are a few ways I can think of to do this but I’m not sure what would be the best way.
You can just mount individual drives or partitions to the corresponding location (xdg directories or otherwise). This is what I generally do.
I haven’t tried this but If you don’t want to partition the shared drives, you could make corresponding folders on the root of the drive (or anywhere really) and bind mount those folders to the corresponding location. For it to be persistent across reboots, a brief search says you can put it in fstab this way: /source /destination none defaults,bind 0 0 There is also rbind which I think is recursive but I haven’t read up on when to use it.
I haven’t tried this either and forget which is which but symbolic link or hard link may or may not be viable and would also be persistent I think.
