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:
- OS on 2TB, and the 1TB for extra storage, call it a day.
- OS on 1TB, and the 2TB for extra storage
- 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.
- 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.
I'm an old guy, whose been in Linux, off'n'on since 1997 or 1996, and not a professional.
Keep that in mind.
I now always recommend a pair of NVMe's,
with swap on both,
with root mdadm mirrored RAID1 on both ( I've read that BTRFS "RAID1", when 1 mirror is missing on boot, simply won't permit you to boot, unless you get jiggy with the damn thing, telling it arbitrary stuff, to get it to allow that )
with /home mdadm mirrored RAID1
and use the extra space for whatever.
Use SATA for your backups.
I recommend using the fastest NVMe's you can get, but biggest is more-important.
Samsung .. what are they, EVO drives? go up to 2TB, iirc, and are reasonably cheap ( for people who can afford such things )...
This gives Linux's mdadm RAID1 speed ( it does RAID0 for reads, RAID1 for writes ), AND it gives greater reliability.
I've been stung by incorrect partition space allocation sooo many times, that now I'd stick everything on as few partitions as is sane, but as OpenBSD recommends, some filesystems on separate partitions breaks some attack-methods ( partly by breaking hardlinks ).
The difference that access-speed & bandwidth do, for your OS, and especially swap, is stunning, so if you've got the funds, consider the Samsung PRO NVMe's, instead of their EVO's, but definitely get quality & quick NVMe's, RAID1 'em up, and enjoy.
PS: I always do a prototype-install, now:
whole-device ( except swap, EFI, boot ), 1 partition, install everything I'm likely to want, of that OS, take a look at the filesystem use, for different parts of the root fs-tree, and then begin deciding what partition-sizes to be considering, using a 1.5x or 2x factor for expansion-space... ( different distros with /usr and /opt, especially ).
Then I repartition into the intended structure, & install in...
And, of course, I now expect to have to re-partition 1/2y later, as the things I've later found, & added, alter the ratios...
Obviously, if this weren't just some random guy at home, LLVM would make much more sense, because then partitions could be resized/redistributed on-the-fly.
But for now, for a machine I only-sometimes use, it's good enough.
Maybe this seems useful information?
I hope so...
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