Best way to mount SSD and HDD Advice?

[jmcginley]

Potentially a big newbie question but got to start somewhere!

I've been looking in to this for a while now and struggling to find a solution that I understand so hopefully someone else has a set up which is similar to what I want and can give some advice.

I have a 125gb SSD which I am currently booting from and also storing everything on, software, games, files etc. However i also have a 1tb HDD which would be a much more suitable device to store everything on. So ideally I would like a set up which tells my PC to boot from the SSD but after that just use the HDD, is this possible? Would there be any benefit to keeping some items such as software on the SSD (from a speed perspective) and how would this be achieved if so?

I'm willing to do a complete re-install of Linux if that helps the process and in the past have tried mounting the HDD as /home and the SSD as / but this has not worked for me (probably because I'm doing it wrong).

[Flemur]

So ideally I would like a set up which tells my PC to boot from the SSD but after that just use the HDD, is this possible?

That sounds like a separate boot partition with the rest of the OS on the HD.

Would there be any benefit to keeping some items such as software on the SSD (from a speed perspective) and how would this be achieved if so?

Best would be to use the SSD for booting AND the entire OS - like you already have - and use the HD for either a /home partition, or a "data" partition, which can be set up in different ways. Either is pretty easy to do with the OS already setup like you have (data is easier) without reinstalling - check this forum ...

[catweazel]

I have a 125gb SSD which I am currently booting from and also storing everything on, software, games, files etc. However i also have a 1tb HDD which would be a much more suitable device to store everything on.

You might eventually come to realise that that's a complete waste of 100GB or so of high-speed SSD. You only need around 30GB for the OS, depending on your needs maybe 50GB. If you put everything onto the HDD then that space on your SSD goes unused. You're better off keeping things that you need regular access to in your /home directory on the SSD and using the HDD for all other things, including backups.

[AZgl1800]

I have a 125gb SSD which I am currently booting from and also storing everything on, software, games, files etc. However i also have a 1tb HDD which would be a much more suitable device to store everything on.

You might eventually come to realise that that's a complete waste of 100GB or so of high-speed SSD. You only need around 30GB for the OS, depending on your needs maybe 50GB. If you put everything onto the HDD then that space on your SSD goes unused. You're better off keeping things that you need regular access to in your /home directory on the SSD and using the HDD for all other things, including backups.

This is how I do it myself.

I split the 500gB SSD into two major partitions, the 2nd one is for backups....
nearly everything I need or want is stored on just the SSD, and backed up on the 2nd half of the SSD, and then a 6TB HDD backs up everything again.

You can see here that I also have the 1/2 half partitioned off again and running LMDE3-Cindy on it.
you can get a lot of mileage out of not too much space....

[catweazel]

This is how I do it myself.

You might want to shrink that right-hand partition by 75GB (15%), or at least 50GB (10%), and leave the space unallocated, i.e. don't partition it. This will cause the SSD controller to use the empty space to greatly extend the life of your SSD. If you need more information, search for over-provisioning.

[AZgl1800]

This is how I do it myself.

You might want to shrink that right-hand partition by 75GB (15%), or at least 50GB (10%), and leave the space unallocated, i.e. don't partition it. This will cause the SSD controller to use the empty space to greatly extend the life of your SSD. If you need more information, search for over-provisioning.

good point, I meant to do that, but forgot about it long ago....
that is on tomorrrow's To Do list.

[AndyMH]

I'd put both / and /home partitions on your SSD and then mount your 1TB HDD as something like /home/you/data. That way the OS is on the fastest device, stuff that you use frequently is also on the fastest drive and other stuff can live on the HDD.

This is a similar setup to my home brew desktop. It has a 120G SSD for / and /home and a 1TB HDD. I've split the HDD, 300G for data and the rest for backup.

It will mean you need to edit your fstab file (lives in /etc - open as root). This is straightforward, add an entry along the lines of the following

Code: Select all

# mount point for data
UUID=5cdf25ee-93ed-41a0-96f5-31ff2f85862c /home/andy/data ext4 defaults,nofail 0 2

You get the UUID by typing blkid into a terminal.

This gives you a bit more info on fstab:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab

[jmcginley]

Thanks for the advice, I think I have it set up how I like it, although even though I've set the HDD up to be mounted on startup Steam doesn't seem to recognise that its there until i manually go to 'Computer' on my desktop and at least select the HDD. Once I've done this then Steam recognises all the installed games on it. Only a minor issue but it'd be nice to just go straight to Steam and play games without having to select the HDD before.

[AndyMH]

If you are mounting it through fstab then the defaults option should mount it automatically on boot:

defaults = rw, suid, dev, exec, auto, nouser, and async

[AZgl1800]

You might eventually come to realise that that's a complete waste of 100GB or so of high-speed SSD. You only need around 30GB for the OS, depending on your needs maybe 50GB. If you put everything onto the HDD then that space on your SSD goes unused. You're better off keeping things that you need regular access to in your /home directory on the SSD and using the HDD for all other things, including backups.

I agree,
I have everything on the SSD, and back it up to HDD.
this lets me benefit from the SSD's speed in reading/writing to files.

Every thing in this Gparted image is my 500gB SSD, it is partitioned to allow me to make as much use of it as possible. I have a crontab job that runs fstrim daily to free up space after something is deleted.
the newer SSDs do not suffer from the write/delete/write/delete problems like they use to.

Gparted.png

[catweazel]

You might eventually come to realise that that's a complete waste of 100GB or so of high-speed SSD. You only need around 30GB for the OS, depending on your needs maybe 50GB. If you put everything onto the HDD then that space on your SSD goes unused. You're better off keeping things that you need regular access to in your /home directory on the SSD and using the HDD for all other things, including backups.

I agree,

lol - that was copy pasted from my post higher up, mate.