I started out by having only Windows, and what I did was simply shrink the windows partitions and add some ext4 at the end for Arch.

Now I want to get rid of all Windows and go Linux-only, and was wondering what would be the best setup for my use-case, which is mostly gaming, some programming.

I have these disks:

  • one very fast m.2 1TB SSD that I want my current most-played games on
  • one slower SATA 1TB SSD that I would be fine with games I play less or whose loading times I don’t care that much about
  • one newer 4TB HDD for all my music, photos, documents, torrents and shit
  • one old 1TB HDD for idk whatever

The root volume is on the m.2 SSD and is LUKS encrypted. Would love for everything to be encrypted.

The rest are all just separate mount points, and I either manually or use Steam’s storage features to move games around.

Since I’m still mostly a Linux noob, I was just wondering what more experienced Lemmy people would think to be best.

I was thinking about some LVM setup (though I haven’t looked at yet how that works) that via lvmcache automatically uses the faster drives for the most used data, but I’m not sure how well that works compared to just moving the games I care about to the fast SSD, because as far as I see it works by caching the most-used stuff, but I want a new game I install to be immediately fast, not some time later after it was determined that it’s “most-used”.

  • CallMeAl (like Alan)@piefed.zipEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    I used to use iostat to monitor device utilization but now I don’t bother and just choose based on use case.

    Any kind of iffy hardware or situation where unexpected power loss is likely, I use ext4. It’s robust af.

    Do I need multi-drive volumes and high availability? Then its ZFS.

    Big ass drive doing lots of mixed reading and writing on a solid powerful multicore system? XFS all day long. Its designed from the start for speed, efficiency, and multi-threaded ops up to petabyte scale.