this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Advice for a newbie - Multiple drives setup (fedia.io)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hi all, I've had a trawl around but can't quite find the answer I'm looking for. I'm currently on Windows with 5 separate physical storage drives with different purposes - OS, games, media, apps, random bullshit.

I've been trialling Linux on and off for ages and I think I've settled on Garuda for now. I'd like to have a similar style of separation under Linux if possible - in case I fancy a change of distro etc.

I'm assuming I can just leave my media drive as just a drive. My understanding is that apps/games are installed in the /usr/bin folder?

Is it possible or even worthwhile specifying a /usr/bin/apps and /usr/bin/games folder and pointing each folder to their respective drive? Or as both drives are the same make/model would it just be better to use them both as a single virtual volume?

Thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A lot of this is personal preference but I will suggest the following strategy. Mount all of your drives into subfolders of /mnt or /media (/mnt is usually used for more permanent storage but either is fine). Then symlink various folders on the system to this mount point. Like maybe you want your home folder downloads on one of these drives so /home/spawnsalot/Downloads is symlinkef to /mnt/drive1/Downloads.

This lets you pick and choose various places across your system that are actually on the additional drives but also the ability to see everything on the drives in one place.

Game installation location completely depends on the game itself. Some might install to /usr/bin, others to /opt, etc. You might have to dig around a little after install, move the folder, then symlink it like nothing ever happened.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

Since I haven't WELL ACKSHULLY'd anyone today: /mnt is for temporary user mounts, and /media is for removable storage like USB drives and stuff.

To be fully Linux Nerd(TM) compliant, you probably want to actually just mount the drives anywhere you want to mount the drives, because for some really goofy reason, there wasn't and isn't an Official(TM) filesystem location for mounting permanently attached storage.

Yeah I don't know either.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

You can edit the /etc/fstab or setup systemd mounts so all the files are mounted at the correct spot at startup. Different drives are mounted to folders on Linux instead of drive letters like on windows. Before you reboot, make sure everything works by running mount -a otherwise you will have to rescue the system

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

It depends on how you install stuff. Games on Steam or downloaded from online from places like itch.io can be put on any drive without issue.

In terms of software though, native packages (deb, rpm) are gonna want to put files in various system folders, so it's pretty much impossible to get those off your os drive.

Other packaging solutions can help with this though. Appimages can be put anywhere, nix let's you install to another drive, same with flatpak.

And if you're savvy, you could use docker to install system packages on other drives, although I wouldn't recommend it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for the input everyone, I think I'll go with rolling apps and OS into one drive as that seems inescapable and using fstab to mount my games drive inside /home/USER/ with a media drive left as just a drive. That leaves me with my smaller drive for Windows and a spare OS agnostic drive for both OS's to access.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Have you considered some kind of parity system to protect you from data loss in case of failure?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

I've got both cloud backups for important docs etc and nas for anything else thanks

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago

You can. Someone else mentioned fstab and that’s how you’d do it.

Seems like a lot of work though.

Why are you doing things like that?

I can think of a couple of possible reasons:

Space. You just don’t have a big enough single disk to install all the games and media and stuff.

Performance. You might have a fast drive or interface to connect a drive to that’ll make things run quicker.

Plausible deniability: disconnect the games and porno drive and the work from home spyware can’t detect them.

Personal preference: all the porno is in its proper place, all the games are tucked away on their block device. Gods in his heaven.