How are you all partitioning your setup?

I have 2 drives in my machine. Linux right now is installed on 1/4 of the first drive and I am going to start moving parts of my 2nd drive, which is just games on Windows, to a 1/2 combo of NTFS and BTRFS. Essentially giving Linux more space as it replaces Windows as my gaming daily driver. With the eventual plan to move that entire 2nd drive over to BTRFS, and allow Windows to have 3/4 of the 1st drive for games that only run under it.

Curious how folks have set this up. Currently I have Steam, Heroic and Lutris installing to ~/Games. So it may make sense to mount my new drive there, but I am not sure that in home folder mounts make sense. I also realize I could potentially use BTRFS to make it look like my space is all one mount point vs multiple, but given the complexity of that filesystem I am worried there is a downside I am not aware of.

Any suggestions? What has worked for you for your setup?

AmazingAwesomator ,

2tb m.2: ext4, installation partition + general use

1tb m.w: ext4, secondary drive with some backup

(i dont have a nas yet :( )

xkforce ,

I dont even want to think about how many partitions there are on my PC. windows has 4 or 5 just existing, then there's root, home and swap plus 2 more for the 2 other drives. So.. 9 or 10? its been a while since I had a reason to care.

As for what you should do, if you are replacing windows, it wont really matter what the format on the windows part is because youre going to need to back up the save data and reinstall those games eventually anyway. You cant really run the same game installs on both OSes.

Worx ,

I wouldn't recommend it, but my current setup is I reach into the computer, unplug one SSD and plug in the other. Not the most high-tech dual boot but yeah

FrederikNJS ,
  • 1TB NVMe SSD
    • 512 MB EFI
    • BTRFS partition for / filling up the rest
  • Ancient 128 GB SATA SSD
    • Swap
  • 1TB SATA SSD
    • 500 GB Windows installation for VR games
    • 500 GB BTRFS partition mounted at /mnt/games

Since both my root and home are on the same BTRFS partition they share space.

I have made sure to create sub volumes for the Steam and Game install directories, to avoid taking snapshots of them.

Steam has 2 "libraries" registered, one in my home directory and one in /mnt/games

million OP ,
@million@lemmy.world avatar

Two libraries sound good, but I heard the Steam Flatpak has issues with libraries on multiple drives. Haven't had a chance to try it myself.

NickKnight ,

Logical volumes. it slows down IO on this setup but i don't run IO intensive games. It allow me to just repartition and add drives as needed.

million OP ,
@million@lemmy.world avatar

Is that the BTRFS raid mode or something else?

FrederikNJS ,

I think he is referring to LVM

Murdoc ,

Wait, what? LVs slow down some games? I just finished setting up a new drive for games with them, but I didn't know this. 😟

NickKnight ,

Yeah, logical volumes has a teeny bit of overhead, same with RAID. both together means you can run older things but things that have a lot of textures loading you will see some drop.

ober ,
@ober@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I have 4 drives. An NVMe drive with four partitions:
500MB /boot
64GB Swap
100GB /
and the rest of the 1TB goes to
/home.
Then I have a 1TB SSD for games which is mounted to ~/Games.
Then I have two 1TB HDDs, one for
Music mounted to ~/Music
and another for
Torrents mounted to ~/Torrents.
I also have an 8TB HDD coming which will be another torrents drive

million OP ,
@million@lemmy.world avatar

I like running torrents on my NAS because I almost always have that on, plus I have ZFS on it so all the data is reasonable durable.

ober ,
@ober@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

I'd love to get a NAS but i'm a bit too stingy. That definitely sounds like a better solution than just leaving my machine on 24/7.

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