Multi-Drive Partitioning For Most Effective Use

General system Gaming, sound and video
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As some of you know and I’ve alluded to - probably this coming weekend I should be delving into what I hope is a computer that will for more or less be the forseeable home base for the better part of the next decade.

With that - I’m looking at a multi disk setup in my next computer.

Internal
-1x gen4 2tb drive for daily use/gaming/etc
-1x gen3 2tb drive for music/media (or maybe even the entire /home partition??)
-1x 4tb Seagate HDD for backup
-1x Samsung Evo 850 500gb for EOS testing/distro hopping. . .

External
-1x external 4tb Seagate HDD for redundant backup of interior drive

Does anyone know where Steam saves/runs games from? Am I going to kill myself if I put /home on the gen3. . . What’s the best way to set this up

In my head:

Main Drive (Gen4): btrfs /
Home (Gen3): btrfs /home
Backup: ext4
Test SSD - ever changing

**All drives upon installation will be completely empty, everything is currently backed up on other drives externally. This entire PC will effectively be “new”

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~/.local/share/Steam

No?

Also worth keeping in mind that gen4 drives aren’t always faster/better than gen3 drives. It depends on the specific drives in questions.

Stop thinking of btrfs like a traditional filesystem.

Instead, think about what you care about and use subvolumes to hold those things. For example:

  • filesystem root(/)
  • logs
  • cache
  • Documents
  • Videos
  • Firefox profile(or whatever browser you use)
  • Music
  • Steam games
  • Pictures
  • Downloads
  • Home(/home)

Then decide which disk you want each of those things on. Create the subvolumes on the appropriate disk and then mount them in /etc/fstab.

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Drives:

2tb Sabrent Rocket Plus-G gen 4

2tb Sabrent Rocket

I only really want the OS and games on main drive ideally. The things where speed matters.

Everything else can go on the gen 3

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Music pictures movies whatever all don’t really matter that much speed wise.

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Create a subvolume for steam on the gen4 drive. Then mount that subvolume at ~/.local/share/Steam

/home can be mounted on the gen3 drive. Systemd will ensure everything gets mounted in the right order.

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Honestly, for 99% of games the performance difference between a fast gen4 and a fast gen3 drive will be very small.

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Maybe.

My other idea was literally just flat out make the gen3 music and start collecting all the music I like so I can effectively stop using streaming services for the overwhelming majority of the time.

I can always download steam games and stuff if I ever get a bigger drive or something and documents and such will already get backed up anyways

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All downloads just go to the main drive, and then I can format the name and setup everything one at a time and methodically move them into the music drive so that way everything is good to go and in order.

Then it’s just normal install everything to the one drive and work out of it.

I’ve got probably 100 CD to start with, and slowly pull from YouTube to build the local collection.

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@fbodymechanic
You have to look at the specs of the drives you are going to purchase. They can have a significant difference in read and write speeds.

I recommend WD Black SN850X as they are faster than the Samsung Pro 980. You would have to step up to the Samsung Pro 990 which are too expensive to get the same. The WD Black are extremely good. I’m using them and they have been rock solid. Better off to go also with Samsung Evo 870 500GB SSD
4 TB Seagate is good as they are also reasonable in price.

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Everything is already purchased. I’m just waiting for arrival of parts. :grin:

I already owned all the drives except the one rocket plus g. And it was only $150, so I couldn’t say no to that

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I understand. … :wink:

Edit: How much did you pay for the case? They had them on sale here.

Edit: I think they went off sale now. Is this the one?

07401

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Personally. $0

I have a birthday shortly, so the case was technically free. Although the Lian Li case sells for $150 here.

This was all prompted because a buddy of mine had an ASRock B550 steel legend motherboard brand new in his closet from a build about a year ago. He told me I could have it.

So the wife said go for it. And I’m selling the Legion.

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Yes.

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Well they did have it on sale last week and would have been about the same money but now it’s back up to $229.00 Cdn.

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I used PCPartPicker to make sure everything fit, best prices, etc.

I got some big items used to save money for instance

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My Ryzen machine here is very similar but i only have two 500 GB m.2 drives in it and a 500 GB SSD plus an Internal 4 TB Seagate HD which currently I’m not really using.

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I don’t want to spoil the surprise :wink:

I’ll probably take lots of pictures and do a little write up about the process.

I’m excited, I’ve never built a computer before.

I generally buy sabrent drives also. By far my favorites these days. Plus if I have a problem with anything at all, they are right here in Los Angeles.

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I’ve built many over the years. Too many! :rofl:

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Well, I’ve never had the space and now that I do I want to get away from the never ending cycle of laptops. I only need my Thinkpad.

It should be fun, a couple people already know. Others will need to wait for the fun to start. :grin:

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Well I’m kind of in the same boat. I have sitting here in the closet parts also such as a new MSI B550 Tomahawk and an Asus RX 6750 Graphics card 12 GB with AMD Ryzen 5800X plus other parts along with the case. Missing the pwr supply and ram and drives yet.

Edit: Like i need another Desktop! :laughing: