More disk space

General system Newbie
1

Endeavour has been my daily for a while now, and now my main disk is full.

I have bought a new SSD disk (m2) and my first question is: how do I make this disk available? I have found it with fdisk.

Furthermore, I plan on using this disk for games. I already have lutris, heroic, steam and battle.net. with games installed already. I’m still wrapping my head around the concept of files and paths in Linux contra Windows, and I wonder if it’s possible to mount the new disk as some sort of destination for games seamlessly, so that I don’t have to change much of my current setup.

Thank you!

2

Without knowing your device setup it’s hard to say. If your plan is for games and such you’d probably be better off assigning that new drive to be your home partition. But I don’t know what that would do to your current free space issue.

I’d suggest running df -h from the command line and share that here. That would tell me what your partition layout looks like to better help.

IF setting it up as your home directory is the end goal then you’ll need to modify /etc/fstab and either change the line that mounts /home or add one.

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The output of df -h:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev              16G     0   16G   0% /dev
run              16G  2,0M   16G   1% /run
/dev/sda2       219G  195G   13G  94% /
tmpfs            16G  751M   15G   5% /dev/shm
tmpfs            16G   65M   16G   1% /tmp
/dev/sda1       511M  304K  511M   1% /boot/efi
tmpfs           3,2G   80K  3,2G   1% /run/user/1000

However; on fdisk -l I find:

Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 465,76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Disk model: KINGSTON SA2000M8500G                   
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x0cff4255

Device         Boot Start       End   Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1       2048 976771071 976769024 465,8G  7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT

I want nvme0n1 to be available from endeavour—I have two more disks with Windows on it, but that’s irrelevant, and I need that to work as they do per now.

I don’t know? As I said, I’m new to the Linux approach to files (all configurations in a personal or system wide folder, home and other Linux ways of doing it).

If I was to describe my situation as I understand it, it would be something like this:

  • I have installed EndeavourOS on a 120gb ssd
  • Said disk is running out of space (15gb left)
  • I have bought and inserted a new disk
  • New disk is found in fdisk -l but not in Dolphin
  • I want to install a new game from Steam, but it’s larger than 15gb → need more available space

And, as a sidestep to this;

  • I don’t know how to change the folder where Steam finds and installs games automatically, and if this can be done without changing /home.

So, first of all, I want the M2 disk to show up and be used… :upside_down_face:

4

Short version: After drive is installed partition the way you want (all one partition as /home or perhaps two partitions as /home and then /games). Format one / both and add one / both to your /etc/fstab so they mount at boot. Searches will very quickly and easily get you to all of this. obviously you would need move the data that is currently in your /home as part of this.

Personally I would recommend putting games somewhere other than /home. Otherwise you probably will want to exclude them from whatever regular backup you do of your /home directory.

For Steam - if you go into settings you can add a library directory - this is easiest. There is also an option to move everything in your library to the new location once it’s been added.

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In simple words open gparted and format the new hard disk in ext4. You can then use it as you wish.

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How would I know how much space is needed for each? On my Windows setup I have 2tb for games and 240gb for Windows and system related files. Would partitioning this disk function the same way?

English isn’t my primary language, so this I cannot comprehend. Sorry.

So if I format the new disk as /games and start moving gaming related stuff there, I should achieve what I wish?

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Ok so what I get from that is that you do not have a separate home partition. That’s usually considered a linux best practice. However in this case that’ll make things easier.

Do this only if you don’t intend to use that new m.2 in windows as well because the first step will make it so windows will not use the drive without reformatting it.

The rundown of the steps are as follows:

  1. format the drive as a linux drive (ext4, btrfs are the two most common)
  2. mount it to a temporary location (/mnt for example)
  3. copy/move home files over to the new mount (this will be required to free up the space on the existing partition)
  4. modify /etc/fstab to automatically mount /home

@MikeDelta42 gave an alternate with two partitions on the drive, one for home and one for games. This works as well, and really is a personal preference.

  1. is easily accomplished with something like gparted (one or two partitions depending on what you want)
  2. might happen automatically depending on your gui/file manager, if not it’ll be something like mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /mnt
  3. sudo cp -r /home /mnt (or sudo mv /home/* /mnt) – This could cause temporary issues, these are your files you are moving
  4. for me I use nvim but whatever editor you want sudo nvim /etc/fstab You’ll add a like like this
    /dev/nvme0n1p1 /home ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2

If someone else’s advice is easier to follow or makes more sense, by all means use theirs. This is just how I would do it (well I’d use fdisk and mkfs instead of gparted but I’ve been using linux for a long time)

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Yes, it would function the same way. If you are going to use separate /home and /games partitions just figure out how much you think each would take. /games will surely need more that /home. By the way, if you want to keep this simple and just do it as one partition as /home that’s totally ok too. I was just giving you options.

What I am saying is whatever partition(s) you end up with, you will want to add them to your /etc/fstab file so they mount at boot.

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Ok, this is making sense.

As @Zircon34 said, I just have to format the disk to have it show up.

As @MikeDelta42 and @fizzatbeyond have mentioned; I should consider making both /home and /games.

I have understood that /home contains the files of all users on the system, albeit as separate home folders per user. Said files can be personal configuration files for system-wide programs, as well as whatever documents and media files I have stored (pictures, music, downloads, whatever). Yes?

So, in the case of 3 users, there will be 3 instances of ~, with various content? ls /home will return user1, user2 and user3. Ok, this makes sense.

For some reason du -h /home returns 158G, which to me sounds like “everything” has been put in here?

The output of du -h / --max-depth=1 is:

16K     /lost+found
151M    /dev
9,9M    /tmp
116K    /root
15G     /usr
2,0G    /opt
12K     /srv
22G     /var
14M     /etc
2,1M    /run
0       /proc
158G    /home
0       /sys
4,0K    /mnt
124M    /boot
196G    /

Can I maybe then keep my current disk as it is, and rather move the rest of the gaming related files to the new /games partition?

Will it also be easier to

if I just create one new /games partition on the M2?

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I ended up creating a new partition and labelled it games.

Now it ends up on /run/media/username/games. This can’t be right?

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You can specify where you mount it. You can create a directory then mount it to that directory. You can do this whether you are manually mounting it or when you mount it at boot via fstab.

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Ok, thanks @fizzatbeyond, @Zircon34 and @MikeDelta42!

My problem is solved! It was all your contributions collectively that helped me.

Because I loathe forum posts without a clear solution, here is a short summary of my situation:

First, to find the new disk in my GUI (and therefore also in my understanding), all I had to do was open a proper disk manager. As I use KDE, I ended up with KDE Partition manager. sudo pacman -S partitionmanager

Here, I found the disk I had inserted. I formatted it as ext4. I chose extended partition as I was to have data on it. I labelled it “games”. (This has nothing to do with the path /games).

When I had done this, I went to /. cd / in terminal. Here I created the folder “games”: sudo mkdir games.

When the folder had been made, I made the necessary changes to /etc/fstab. I prefer nano: sudo nano /etc/fstab. I added the line: /dev/nvme0n1p1 /games ext4 defaults,noatime 0 2 to the bottom of the file, saved and closed.

Then I restarted the machine to see if it worked. It did.

I then added the new /games to steam, going into steam settings under “Steam” in the application. Here I could move my current games from /home/username/steamFiles to the new /games to free some space.

As a result I now have my steam games under /games, and a lot more available space on / and /home.

So if anyone else stumbles upon my post—here is the solution that worked for me.

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13

Awesome! Well done.

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14

Looks like you’ve already set it up, but if you don’t mind repeating the process, one really useful thing you can do for your games drive is to format it as btrfs and enable compression.

It saves me 100GB of disk space on my games drive, at no cost, not even noticeable CPU usage:

:; sudo compsize games/
Processed 275553 files, 2307553 regular extents (2316087 refs), 63954 inline.
Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced  
TOTAL       84%      525G         622G         622G       
none       100%      403G         403G         403G       
zstd        55%      121G         218G         219G

All that’s needed is to format the drive as btrfs and add compress-force=zstd:3 to the fstab mount options. Games tend to be very compressible, so I highly recommend this.

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I read that btrfs requires maintenance to not fuck up on me (Good and up-to-date post-install guides). That kinda put me off the thought of using btrfs, really.

Would you say that this is an exaggeration and I should consider it anyway? I know Garuda uses btrfs, and that’s a gaming-centric distro.

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