I have an x220, yes it is old but I prefer the keyboard and the repairability. Anyway, it has 1 x msata SSD (2TB Orico) and 1 x 2.5 inch SSD (2TB Samsung).
What I want:
- to take advantage of 2 drives.
- no windows. I go full Linux now.
- some forms of backup if system fails.
What I managed to do:
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/, swap and all system directories on the msata
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/home is dedicated to the entire 2.5 ssd.
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fully encrypted. I.e the msata has a LUKS partition that mounts /, swap and others. The 2.5 inch also has a LUKS partiton for /home. My /home is on its own, so if system fails or I need to distro hop, I can keep all of my data.
System runs fine but is this a good idea in the long run?
Should I have it the other way? Root and swap and systems on faster 2.5inch SSD. Home in the smaller msata?
What about everything on the faster 2.5 drive, then use the slower msata for backups? Since I have 2TB, I’m thinking partition the msata into 2 so I can do: Timeshift backup on one, and Borg backup for my personal files on the other?
It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with this, but it’s not the most in line with your goals. If you’re worried about data loss, you could have made a volume that spans both drives like RAID1/Z1, or you could have setup some clever data spanning with BTRFS or likewise. Then you’d be killing two birds with one stone for the Timeshift portion.
If you want safe backups, you need a separate backup drive at a bare minimum.
Did you actually test which drive is faster?
It’s also likely that the mSATA slot is bottlenecked since it runs at SATA II speeds while the 2.5 bay runs at SATA III speeds. This becomes noticeable with heavy swapping or flatpak updates. I found this out the hard way because I want my boot drive on my 256 GB mSATA instead of the 2 TB SSD that I use for media and backups.
did you end up switch everything to the 2.5 ssd?
I didn’t
Msata and ssd, they are both sata and ssd.
Maybe one is faster because its newer or so, but there shouldn’t be much difference. Its not nvme, its msata.
I would slap the two disks in Linux software raid1 to leverage drive failure and use an external disk for backups, maybe over the network (local or remote).
If you don’t want to waste 50% of your space, use one disk as home, the other as root&boot&swap (is swap even a good idea? Maybe zram). Any extra space on the other dunnow… Mybe additional home space?
