Partitioning for set up

Hi guys, I have a bit of an issue with my partitions/disks. I have 3 disks:
sda - 120G
sdb - 800G
sdc - 1TB
and want to use sda for the EFI partition and root, sdb for /home and sdc for data to be symlinked to the various folders (Music & Videos) but I’m not sure of two things:

  1. I am intending to use the auto partitioner in order to setup BTRFS snapshots but don’t know whether to mount /home or let calamares create the mountpoints and add sdb later in fstab as @home or /home

  2. Does it matter if I mount my data drive (sdc) as /DATA or should I use /mnt/DATA or /run/media/username/home?

I have been using opensuse recently due to the BTRFS rollback feature but I prefer arch and have tried many diffrent distros and set ups, including Manjaro (until the recent scandal/issues), EndeavourOS (which I like but would like a more ‘out-of-the-box’ approach to snapshots.

Thanks in advance

120 GiB for EFI partition is too much, in my opinion. I use 100 MiB, and even that’s almost empty. I am not dual booting, though, and if I did, I’d have OSs on separate drives.

1 Like

Hi, I’m afraid I may have phrased it badly - the 120GB SSD is for /efi and /root - I usually use about 500M for efi and the rest as /root

2 Likes

Oh, sorry I misunderstood you. Yeah, that’s fine.

You don’t have to mount home or that third drive during install. You can do that manually later.

1 Like

No problem

Because I want to use the 800G drive for home, I don’t know if I should mount it as /home or @home, actually I don’t know whether to use EXT4 or BTRFS for my home partition either.

if you want a complete btrfs setup

just use 120 gb drive and go for erase entire disk

then

after booting

you can add
other disks to expand the space

btrfs device add /dev/sdb /home/sdb

then balance the filesystem

btrfs filesystem balance /
5 Likes

Hi @librewish, thank you for your blazingly-fast reply. I wasn’t expecting such a quick response.

Isn’t there a bigger risk of losing data by doing this? also, what about steam games that I install on there, should I turn off COW on those directories (if it is possible)?

Finally, what should I mount my data drive (EXT4) as?

if there is data existing on those drives

i think you should just symlink them to your home

ln -s /dev/sdb ~/Games
2 Likes

there isn’t any existing data on sdb (both sda and sdb are SSDs) so I could use it as described but if I download a steam game to the SSD/s, should I disable COW?

My data drive is a HDD which has my music and films on it, I normally mount it to /DATA and then use symlinks as you describe but I have often wondered if /DATA is ok or should it be /mnt/DATA or /run/media/username/DATA?

/mnt /data etc directory should not matter as long as end result ie your symlink is at desired destination
and you cann read write to it

if files are bigger then you can disable cow

chattr +C /home/user/media
5 Likes

Thank you so much, I’m going to give it a try now

1 Like

If you have some permission/ownership oddities on your data drive ( I use /mnt/data myself - if it matters) - don’t forget to ask here before ‘fixing’ it :grin: Depending on your exact setup, it can be easily fixed - but knowledge of your setup and intentions can help determine which easy fix is appropriate…

5 Likes

this is my first outing with btrfs, so, pardon my lack of knowledge here.
before i do the btrfs device command i should format the second disk. do i need to mount it or will btrfs just take care of that?
i added a btrfs partition on /dev/sda which is actually my second drive.
when i issue the btrfs device add /dev/sda /home/sda
it returns no such file or directory. i figure im just missing an obvious step here.

my setup is a 128 gig ssd with /boot/efi and / on sdb, and i want to make home the entirety of /dev/sda. there is nothing on the sda drive.

solved it. device add /dev/sda /home
then balance it.