r/archlinux • u/Maou_Diablo_ • 3d ago

QUESTION Need help in deciding drive partition

Hey guys, I know this is not a specific sub to post this but I want to get some of you veterans who has daily driven arch with fresh installs and even changed the drives since I'm also installing arch on my PC. But the problem for me is deciding the right partition. I have

  1. 512 GB NVME SSD
  2. 4 TB HDD

How do I partition these drive I have decided to go with BTRFS for / and EXT4 for /home but if I ever get the itch to distro hop and comeback again to arch or stay on the other distro I don't want to have any conflicts for my 4tb drive where I store all my documents and media. I even checked in AI and AI suggested to have symlink to 4 TB drive or use XDG desktop mechanism to route to /Documents, /Videos, /Pictures, /Music etc. but also warned some apps might look for the specific folder like screenshot app to look for /Pictures instead of /data/Pictures.

So what do you guys recommend ? How should I partition it ? Some of you might be using much more larger storage than I am so wanted to check with you guys on how you partition it without having conflicts

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2

u/AppointmentNearby161 3d ago

If you use btrfs, or LVM ...., on the 4 TB drive, you could make subvolumes for home, videos, Pictures, and mount them wherever you want.

1

u/backsideup 3d ago

btrfs on spinning disks has an intolerable latency.

2

u/AppointmentNearby161 3d ago

Depends what you are using it for. Videos and pictures are generally write once read many so dont suffer from fragmentation. Databases can be made nocow.

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6

u/Toaster_Strudel_517 3d ago

Btrfs for / and /home subvolumes. Also pls don't rely on ai before it inevitably nukes your data.

-5

u/Maou_Diablo_ 3d ago

okay. but how do I split use my 4TTB HDD if anything goes wrong ? I want to only wipe / if it ever comes to it and keep the 4Tb untouched. so how can I achieve this ?

2

u/One-Yellow9778 3d ago

I would recommend btrfs for everything including HDDs. no partitioning needed. then home would be just another subvolume.

and the reason for that is efficiency on backups & PITR.

having btrfs on all disks means every disk can be a target for btrfs send-receive. also just having the ability to do subvolume snapshots everywhere is nice.

I'd also recommend btrbk if you're interested in going all-in on btrfs too. not only it automates snapshots, it can also automate the target send-receive for backups, even remotely too.

1

u/BanaTibor 1d ago

The less partitions the better for home pc. If yoi want to play games then utilize your ssd.  Gamer case: ~40-60GB root on the ssd rest is home. Put /var onto the hdd. Either you can have a separate partition for it or just mount bind it to a directory.  If you do not game, root and efi boot on the ssd, home on hdd. I would use ext4 for everything