1

I need more space on my hard drive and I have an unused 8gb USB stick.

How can I use that as an extra hard drive?

0

2 Answers 2

3

Short answer: You can't do what I think you're thinking, but it may be that what I think you think you're thinking isn't what you're thinking and so this will be helpful.

Long answer: You can't extend the partition from your hard drive onto the flash drive, but if you know that your flash drive always mounts to the same location (it will if you don't change it's name), you can put particular folders onto that space using symbolic links. Move the folder you want on the flash drive to the flash drive, then rename (or delete, but that should wait until after a successful test) the copy on your hard drive. Open a terminal and create a symbolic link from the place it was on your hard disk to the place it is on your flash drive. Note that it does not have to be in the same place on your flash drive as it was (for instance, on my Mac I do this with my Steam folder; I put it onto a flash drive so I can use it on multiple computers easily, so long as I keep the flash drive I don't have to re-download)

For instance, say you have a lot of content in your Movies folder:

  • Move (or copy and rename the original, preferably) ~/Movies onto your flash drive (name it whatever you want, and it can be in whatever folder you want, I'm saying it's now called "desktop-movies" in your flash drive Sparky, which is mounted at /media/Sparky/)

  • Open a terminal, run ln -s /media/Sparky/desktop-movies/ ~/Movies to make ~/Movies a link to desktop-movies on /media/Sparky/

  • Remember that if you have spaces or other special characters (not including dashes and underscores) in either folder name, precede them with backslashes, and if you have a backslash then convert it into a double backslash.

0

Maybe with a raid 0 ? Put your USB and your hdd in a raid 0

But if you ever remove the USB your data is unreadable

1
  • Don't EVER mix different levels of storage in RAID configurations !! NEVER !! _And, in general, be very carefull when using removable storage as permanent connected storage.
    – Soren A
    Nov 29, 2016 at 13:04

You must log in to answer this question.

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