Multiple drives question

Question

I'm on Ubuntu 18.04.3

I've just finished building my first PC. I have two drives, one is a 240 GB SSD, which Ubuntu is already installed on. The second is a 1 TB HDD. I've already formatted the HDD with one partition, that is the Ext4 filesystem type.

I was wondering how I would go about mounting the drive, where to mount it.

Answer 1

I see two solutions.

If you shy from using a terminal, and you did not much but install Ubuntu, you could re-install Ubuntu from scratch and go through the guided setup again.

Obviously, there is a better way. You have to mount your second hard drive permanently. This was answered here:

How to mount partition permanently?

Answer 2

I was wondering how I would go about mounting the drive, where to mount it.

It really is your call.

How to go about mounting the drive

There is choice.

What follows is a conceptual overview on how additional partitions are handled. It can help you understand, and make your own decisions on how you prefer to set up your system. It is impossible here to delve into the specific how-to's. You will find that via the Ubuntu manual, in other answers on the site, or via other resources.

The default behaviour of Ubuntu is that an internal partition is not mounted. However, the volume can be seen in the left pane of Files (nautilus) and can be mounted by clicking the icon. This will mount the drive in a folder under /media/$USER, where $USER stands for your log in.

• The name of the folder where the volume is mounted by default will be the same as the volume label of the drive. If the partition has no volume label, then a generic name will be generated.
• The $USER will have full permissions on the mounted drive if it contains a file system that does not support linux permissions (e.g. fat32, ntfs). Otherwise, the mount point will be owned by root. To grant yourself access as $USER to folders in the root of the drive, you can change the ownership of the mount point. Even thought the mount point is dynamically created when the volume is mounted, and deleted when the volume is unmounted, the ownership and permissions of the mount point are remembered.

Although not relevant for this particular question, for removable USB drives, the default behaviour is different: such volumes are automatically mounted when they are present (upon startup) or being connected while the system is running.

Automatically mounting during startup. To have an internal volume automatically mounted when the system starts, a one-time manual intervention is needed. You need to edit the configuration file /etc/fstab to include information on where and how the drive should be mounted. /etc/fstab is a file that indicates to the starting system which volumes need to be connected (aka mounted) to the file system.

Rather than manually editing etc/fstab, you can use the program "Disks" to define such kind of mounts.

The behaviour in the desktop environment will be slightly different depending on where you mount the drive.

• If you mount it under /media or in a folder under your $HOME folder, the drive will show up as an icon in the left pane of your file manager. Because of the directly clickable "icon", the drive really looks as a "separate" drive, in the style of MS Windows.
• If your mount is elsewhere, you will not see icons for the drive anywhere. You reach its contents by navigating to the mount point. the drive does more appear as an integral part of the file system, i.e., as a normal user, you do not notice it is in reality a separate drive.

This default behaviour can be overwritten with the x-gvfs-show mount option.

Where to mount it

Again, it is really your call and a matter of preference.

Personally, I would mount an internal drive through fstab so it is automatically available in the system. I would also make sure that, linux style, it is invisible as a separate volume. Then, I can do whatever I want, eventually for multiple purposes.

If you only use it now and then and for a particular purpose, you could just leave the default, and click it in the file manager when you need it.

You could use it as a data partition for your movies, and mount it to your "Video" directory.

You could use it as a general media storage drive. Then you would create folders "Video", "Music" and "Pictures" on that partition, and replace the folders in your home folders by symbolic links to the folders on that partition (or use mount-bind for that purpose.

You indeed could use it as your /home folder. I would not immediately do that, because your system partition is very large as well. Or, if you do, you then should make good use of the free space on the system partition using one of the suggestions above.

etc. etc. etc. It is your call. You should think about the approach and workflow that works best for you.