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I am installing Ubuntu and used to Windows, so I will make the comparisons to it.

I have a SSD and an HDD.

In windows I would install the OS on the SSD (making it C drive) and put all my games and movies on the HDD (as the D drive).

What's the equivalent in Linux? Mount the SSD as root (/) and the HDD as... what? Does it even need a mount point or can I just use it as /dev/sdc3? What even is a mount point? Can I do it later?

The options are:

  • /
  • /boot
  • /home
  • /tmp
  • /usr
  • /var
  • /srv
  • /opt
  • /usr/local
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  • I found I can type my own and made it /hdd. Does that seem right? Aug 13, 2015 at 22:24

4 Answers 4

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Drives aren't labeled like Windows in Linux. You can create separate partitions and/or drives for each folder (directory) or you can stack them under "root" /.

Any folder you don't allocate in a separate partition will by default be under the / folder as if you had a C: drive with \ folder.

I set up with HDD in anticipation of getting a 256 or 500GB SSD soon. Here is what I would do with your layout.

SSD:
1 fat32 /boot/efi 380 MiB
2 ext4 / 24GB
3 linux swap 8GB (optional)
4 ext4 /home remainder of drive

HDD:
1 ext4 /other (whole drive)

-or-

1 ext4 /games (your size choice) 2 ext4 /movies (remainder of drive)

I hope this helps.

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  • Why have / and /home in separate partitions? And why have /boot/efi in fat32 instead? Aug 14, 2015 at 2:55
  • 1
    The ESP -efi system partition is required with UEFI booting. If system is BIOS, you do not need it. But if UEFI, you also need to partition using gpt, not the 35 year old MBR(msdos) partitioning. If only using Linux you can use gpt with BIOS boot also.
    – oldfred
    Aug 14, 2015 at 3:55
  • The /boot/efi partition was created by Ubuntu when I installed 12.04.
    – Buck
    Aug 14, 2015 at 9:20
  • 1
    @CaptainMan Having / and /home in separate partitions isn't strictly necessary but allows for clean separation of system and data, helps when reinstalling... for more, see these discussions: 1 and 2
    – user423626
    Mar 28, 2016 at 15:58
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In Linux, drives aren't X:, drives are "mounted" in folders. Instead of using D:, you'll use whatever folder you mount the drive on.

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What I ended up doing was mounting the hard disk as /hdd.

Now I would probably mount it as /home under the impression that most bulky files (music, videos, and games) would likely be under /home/<your_name_here>/<your_media_type> (e.g., /home/Jackson/Games). This is usually the default place so I wouldn't need to bother doing anything extra like moving them to /hdd/Games.

A caveat to this is that I personally would not need any of these things to be read/written to the disk quickly, if I did then I would want them to be on the SSD, not he HDD, so I would use a different scheme. For example, if I only had a very small number of games or I had a huge SSD I would probably put them on there. Another thing that comes to mind is high definition video editing, it's sort of the go-to example of something that needs SSDs. Of course I still could make a folder /ssd, but I think you get the idea.

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you can use gparted during the live session making a new primary NTFS partition for your data[games, movies .. etc] and when you boot up your distro, you'll find your new partition attached to a file in the path /media/your_username

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