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Partition layout recommendations

Hi,

I’ve been running Linux for some time, currently on Nobara and happy. Running it on a 1TB NVME, and a second 1TB NVME drive for extra storage for games, etc., both at gen 3.

I find myself running out of room and just picked up 2TB and 1TB NVME drives, both gen 4, and am thinking as to what the best partition layout would be. The 2x1TB gen 3 will be moved to my NAS as a cache pool.

The PC is used for gaming, photo/video editing and web development.

I guess options would be:

  1. OS on 2TB, and the 1TB for extra storage, call it a day.
  2. OS on 1TB, and the 2TB for extra storage
  3. Divy up the 1TB to have a partition for /, another for /home and another for /var and maybe another for games, then on the 2TB have one big partition for games and scratch disk for videos.
  4. Same as option 3 but swap the drives around.

What would YOU do in this situation? I’m leaning towards option 3 or a variation there of, as it gives versatility to hop to a new distro if I want relatively easy, and one big partition for game storage/video scratch.

My mobo only supports 2xNVME drives unfortunately (regret not spending an extra $60-70 on a better one), but I have a USB-C NVME enclosure that I might use with a a spare 1TB that will be removed from the NAS.

Any thoughts?

Edit: sorry forgot to reply. Thank you all for the input, this was great information and I took a deep dive researching some solutions. I ended up just keeping it simple and went with option 2, with the 1TB as the OS drive and 2TB as additional storage, no additional partitions.

patatahooligan ,
@patatahooligan@lemmy.world avatar

I hate partitions. Moving and resizing partitions is not fun if you don’t correctly predict exactly the amount of space you need. If you really want the modularity, use btrfs subvolumes instead. IMPORTANT: While it is definitely feasible, ability to retain subvolumes might depend on the distro installer! Check before you commit to this approach!

Also, consider using LVM or multi-device btrfs to make the drives act as one filesystem. This means that you will never have to worry about where to place your files to balance the load, but it might make removing/replacing a drive in the future harder.

nyan ,

Normally I set up the system drive with a small boot partition, a large root partition, and maybe a swap partition if it’s a machine that will benefit from having swap (that is, not my desktop with its 96GB of RAM). It’s only useful to put /var on a separate partition on a single-user system these days if you’re afraid of a badly-timed write messing up your root, which is quite rare except with Pis and similar wonky hardware that lacks soft-poweroff.

In your case, I’d use the smaller drive as the system drive, and use the second as /home and overflow storage (if you feel it’s necessary to separate those things) with a single partition.

ladyanita22 ,

I would create an LVM and combine the two to get 3TB in one logical disk.

Kekin ,
@Kekin@lemy.lol avatar

I would say option 3.

I can share my current setup in case you’re interested.

I recently moved back to Tumbleweed, and did the following:

/ -> 50GB, BTRFS, currently 13GB used I think

/home -> 800something GB, BTRFS, same drive

/boot/efi -> 512MB i think, same drive

Then a separate drive mounted to a folder in my home directory, for games mostly.

So far it eworks well, at least for me. BTRFS snapshots are working fine too. Flatpaks I have installed as user so they get installed in my home directory.

piexil ,

Os on the fastest drive, one large partition + efi partition unless you have a need for separate /boot.

I use /boot on ext4 and / on btrfs with /home being a separate subvolume.

/boot is ext4 because grub has issues booting to btrfs when using ubiquity auto installer. Why? I do not know.

ober ,
@ober@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I would go with option 4. I have a 1TB NVMe with /boot, /, and /home. Then I have two 1TB SATA III SSDs, one is for games and the other music. It makes more “sense” to have / and /home on separate drives but I don’t recommend this personally because / doesn’t need a whole terabyte of storage so it’d just be wasted. Swap is optional (I don’t use it even on Gentoo). Me picking option 4 over 3 is just personal preference though. I like having /home smaller because it just holds basic stuff and then I have my 2 extra drives as bulk storage dedicated to something.

db2 ,

I try to give root at least 200GB, haven’t hit the ceiling yet that way. EFI doesn’t need much, recovery (timeshift) is optional but recommend, swap is what you make of it. I used to do different partitions for /opt and /var and the like, but with drive sizes today that’s unnecessary. The biggest thing I’d recommend is to put /home on a separate drive, ideally root and /home would be on distinct NVME drives.

Dirk ,
@Dirk@lemmy.ml avatar

Haven’t hit the ceiling with 30 gigabytes on my ~10 years old installation.

Separating the systemmany further that / and /home on a desktop computer is not needed in reality.

Paragone ,

I’m an old guy, whose been in Linux, off’n’on since 1997 or 1996, and not a professional.

Keep that in mind.

I now always recommend a pair of NVMe’s,

with swap on both,

with root mdadm mirrored RAID1 on both ( I’ve read that BTRFS “RAID1”, when 1 mirror is missing on boot, simply won’t permit you to boot, unless you get jiggy with the damn thing, telling it arbitrary stuff, to get it to allow that )

with /home mdadm mirrored RAID1

and use the extra space for whatever.

Use SATA for your backups.

I recommend using the fastest NVMe’s you can get, but biggest is more-important.

Samsung … what are they, EVO drives? go up to 2TB, iirc, and are reasonably cheap ( for people who can afford such things )…

This gives Linux’s mdadm RAID1 speed ( it does RAID0 for reads, RAID1 for writes ), AND it gives greater reliability.

I’ve been stung by incorrect partition space allocation sooo many times, that now I’d stick everything on as few partitions as is sane, but as OpenBSD recommends, some filesystems on separate partitions breaks some attack-methods ( partly by breaking hardlinks ).

The difference that access-speed & bandwidth do, for your OS, and especially swap, is stunning, so if you’ve got the funds, consider the Samsung PRO NVMe’s, instead of their EVO’s, but definitely get quality & quick NVMe’s, RAID1 'em up, and enjoy.

PS: I always do a prototype-install, now:

whole-device ( except swap, EFI, boot ), 1 partition, install everything I’m likely to want, of that OS, take a look at the filesystem use, for different parts of the root fs-tree, and then begin deciding what partition-sizes to be considering, using a 1.5x or 2x factor for expansion-space… ( different distros with /usr and /opt, especially ).

Then I repartition into the intended structure, & install in…

And, of course, I now expect to have to re-partition 1/2y later, as the things I’ve later found, & added, alter the ratios…

Obviously, if this weren’t just some random guy at home, LLVM would make much more sense, because then partitions could be resized/redistributed on-the-fly.

But for now, for a machine I only-sometimes use, it’s good enough.

Maybe this seems useful information?

I hope so…

( :

Pantherina ,

Hmm, I would not really seperate the partitions manually or you are annoyed. Maybe just run some of your bloat on the SSD?

1TB System is more than enough though, even with all the Flatpak apps you should not exceed 100GB

rehydrate5503 OP ,

I’m only considering this because of some articles I read that went over it, but they were a few years old. I could see how that could get annoying though, just with the frustration I’m experienced now with multiple drives.

I don’t think the system and apps exceed 40GB to be honest, the rest is filled with steam library and video/photo scratch that will move to the NAS once that’s done.

Pantherina ,

So then use a seperate partition for your Steam library, if its actually that huge, use the 2TB drive. You can mount it to anything, ~/Steam or the Flatpak container ~/.var/app/x.y.z no problem

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