Question about mounting a data partition directly in /home/user

I’m putting this question under the category of newbie, simply because it’s probably far too simple to bother the big thinkers here on the forum with:

Currently I have my data disk , which is a very slow 5400 rpm HDD, mounted under /mnt/data to be able to leave /home on the SSD, since access to the dotfiles, if they were also on the HDD, is noticeably slow. I then just linked the folders with the data (Documents, Music, Videos, etc.) to /home/user. This works, but is somehow not elegant enough for me. Now I wanted to mount the data disk with its only partition directly to /home/user, to have the advantage that the dotfiles can be on the SSD. This would then look like this in the /etc/fstab:

UUID=caf40634-610f-4992-b2db-16d556eaf403  /home/uwe/  ext4  defaults,noatime  0  2

The question is simple. Is it possible and if so, is there any performance loss at boot time when the slow HDD has to be mounted to /home/user immediately?
Sorry for the stupid question. I will pray the “Our EndeavourOS” three times as penance, I promise! :pray:

ive had my data drive mounted in /home/username/data for a decade with no problems

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That should be enough … :beers:

While it is perfectly fine to have /home/$USER as a mount point, or even /home, I prefer to have as a mount point some subdirectory inside /home/$USER.

Something like /home/$USER/Storage

There are two reasons why I like that:

  1. I’m using an SSD for my root filesystem, and I have /home/$USER/ on that SSD. It’s beneficial to have .config and many other such directories on a fast drive. On the other hand, pictures, documents, videos, and other files that takes up a lot of space, but quick access is typically not crucial, can be on the slow HDD. I can organise them with symlinks so that /home/$USER/Pictures is actually /home/$USER/Storage/Pictures, etc…
  2. If this HDD dies (and they all die eventually), I can still boot up my DE with all the configuration. If the SSD dies, then I have to reinstall the OS anyway, so who cares…
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IMO, this is the most elegant solution. If you find symlinks to be inelegant, you can use bind mounts.

If you mount the data disk at /home/uwe as in your example, won’t that put the dotfiles on the HDD?

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Right, I have not considered … thank you @dalto , @Kresimir

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