Separate SSD per user

Issues & Assistance
1

Hi all,

I currently have three NVME drives, one with CachyOS, one with Windows and one with games installed on Windows. Now the time has come to finally ditch Microslop OS and my plan is to install Cachy on 500GB SSD and allocate two other 1 TB SSD for two users.

In other words, 500GB SSD for system and root, 1TB for User1 and 1TB for User2.

Is that feasable setup? Or are there any caveats I should be aware of?

And how difficult it would be to set this up?

Many thanks!

2

I suppose you could set, ex;

[...]
UUID=999-some-uuid    /              ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=60 0 1
UUID=888-some-uuid    /home/user1    ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=60 0 2
UUID=777-some-uuid    /home/user2    ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=60 0 2
[...]

or similar in /etc/fstab.

Note that of course other options may be used, or other consideration may be required for different filesystems, and of course the UUIDs should reflect actual values.

See also the ArchWiki;

3

I understand that, thank you for your reply.

So, it’s something I’d have to do post installation? There is no way I can do it during install?

As for filesystems, I’m planning to set BTRFS for system and EXT4 for users (?)

Or would would BTRFS for all three drives be better?

4

During installation not easily I can think of. Would be far easier here to use fstab imo, it isn’t difficult to edit.

You can use BTRFS for all filesystems if you like. The one article about the performance impacts people like to cite is usually taken out of context of “will I notice real-world?” where the answer for most users is “no”. Snapshots for /home may not be useful to you, but you should weigh if compression will be.

5

The problem is that during install you would really only be able to set something like the partition used for /home but not for subdirectories of it - the users may not all even be created and anyways calamares provides no particular functionality that could accomplish what we are discussing.

You would need to do it post-install.
Though this could probably be a quick mount, (useradd -m..?,) edit fstab even before booting it up for the first time.

6

@cscs @Frowny

Thank you very much for your help, I’ll give it ago tomorrow.

7

If you go that route, I’d go with ext4 on each. Unless you know what you are doing with BTRFS on seperate drives with seperate homes, i could see it being a problem, with all the sub-volumes and whatever. (not a btrfs pro, but i have had headaches dealing with subvolumes.)

8

If the whole drive is simply for a user, just do 1 subvolume and call it good (suppose it technically wouldn’t be a subvolume at that point?). I have 2 other drives in a similar configuration but instead of being for users is for splitting games and other media. Don’t need to do anything wild at all and can basically treat it like EXT4 config wise.