1

I'm building a PC with a 128GB SSD and a 4TB HDD. I want to move my media collection from smaller external HDDs (NTFS) back into my PC (ext4). There's two formatting options and I tend to prefer the second one. There's no dual boot with Windows so I won't need to access my media collection from Windows.

I could have my swap and root on the SSD and /home on the HDD. Root will take up all the space on the SSD after creating swap and /home will take up all the space on the HDD. My media stuff will be inside /home.

I was thinking that I might instead have /home on the SSD as well and use the HDD purely as a dump for my media collection. Large downloads will go to the HDD. This way the media collection will not be inside /home. This is pretty much like I use my external HDDs now.

Any recommendations?

Improve this question
2
  • See my answer to askubuntu.com/questions/282831/…
    – user68186
    Jun 16, 2015 at 11:03
  • Use the partition on SSD as a bcache caching partition of your home. This way you get unlimited space of the HDD ith the speed of the SSD.
    – solsTiCe
    Jun 16, 2015 at 11:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

I keep my /home on the SSD, but some directories under my user(s) are symbolic linked to /data disk. Like ~/Downloads, ~/Dropbox, ~/VirtualBox VM's, etc...

Because then all the cache directories of the user can be accessed quickly, and the 'data'-directories can't fill up the root suddenly. For example when you create a VM in Virtual box with 64GB disk for a test, suddenly the disk might be full.

Due to reinstalling my os every 6 months (to have a clean system and to learn), I started writing some basic bash scripts, that in the end, I just run command by command anyway, but it gives me a lead and I put reminders. All my favourite apt-get installs are in there, fixes, tricks and my directory creation. Following is a part of it

##after your hdd is mounted on /data let's say
# remind adjust /etc/fstab
MEMEME=$(whoami)
MYSECONDHOME=/data/home/${MEMEME}
sudo mkdir -p ${MYSECONDHOME}
sudo chown ${MEMEME}:${MEMEME} ${MYSECONDHOME}
cd ~/
mv Downloads ${MYSECONDHOME}
ln -s ${MYSECONDHOME}/Downloads ~/Downloads
mv Documents ${MYSECONDHOME}
ln -s ${MYSECONDHOME}/Documents ~/Documents
dropbox stop; sleep 5
mv ./Dropbox ${MYSECONDHOME}
ln -s ${MYSECONDHOME}/Dropbox ~/Dropbox
dropbox start
##... and so on for others
##... remind to stop services before moving their directory
Improve this answer
5
  • Great idea! Have a link to a how-to? I've never used symbolic links before...
    – H3R3T1K
    Jun 16, 2015 at 10:43
  • Don't use symlink. Use mount point. You can mount a partition from you HDD under /home/user/Movie whatever
    – solsTiCe
    Jun 16, 2015 at 11:54
  • @solsTiCe: mountpoints work too but symlinks are the recommended and much safer way to go here.
    – Takkat
    Jun 16, 2015 at 13:09
  • @Takkat 1. I fail to see how and why it would be safer in any way ??? Explain. 2. You will have to mount those partition somewhere aynway. So mount it directly at the rght place.
    – solsTiCe
    Jun 16, 2015 at 14:31
  • ln -s /path/to/file /path/to/symlink
    – aldwinaldwin
    Jun 17, 2015 at 2:33

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .