Making best use of my ssd
OK, so the situation is this: new SSD to put in to my work computer. Excellent, it’s going to boot up quickly, but there are a few issues.
Like most sane Linux Users, I put the /home directory on a different partition so I can wipe and reinstall the OS without any issue. As long as I don’t accidentally format my /home dir, I won’t ever have a problem between reinstalls.
So, I figure I should just keep my home dir on the other drive and mount it on boot, but something struck me: that’s not going to help speed up my profile! I’ve got all these config files littered around my old disk and it makes no sense for them to be read slowly like everything else. Plus, I like to keep VMs in my home dir, and they would benefit from my increased performance! All other things, music, videos, and (yuk) actual documents can be kept on the old drive.
So it struck me, divide the SSD up as I normally would, /, /boot, /home, and swap partitions on the SSD, but then mount the old disk somewhere else. I picked /home/disk2.
So now, I have the following:
/home/matthew/
/home/disk2/matthew/
Of course, that’s no use to me because I have an empty /home/matthew/Documents and /home/disk2/matthew/Documents is full of my old crap.
So I edited fstab:
/home/disk2/matthew/Documents /home/matthew/Documents ext4 defaults,bind 0 0
which basically remaps the Documents in disk2 to my home dir’s documents. I can keep my configs in ~ and my VMs in ~/VMs, which are on the SSD, but anything that can be “slow” just gets dumped in Documents (or Picures, Music, or Videos, which I also set up). It’s also useful, because SSD sizes aren’t huge yet, that you can fill up your Music and Video dirs with more stuff because they’re on a larger disk.
Simple.
Of course, I don’t have to do it with fstab. I could change my gnome start-up apps to automount the directories instead, so if I wipe my / partition I don’t have to reconfigure anything.