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I have just purchased a new Dell laptop which is to become my travel laptop with Kubuntu installed. I initially purchased it with a 512Gb M.2 SSD, but as it had a slot for a second M.2 SSD, I installed a 1Tb drive.

Now, what I was hoping to be able to do was, during the installation process I set up the EFI, / and SWAP partitions on the 512Gb drive, but as these partitions do not consume the whole drive, I wanted to make the remainder my /home partition and carry (merge/span) this across to the 1Tb drive.

Is this possible, but more importantly, wise?

Thank you

lloydc61
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    Not sure if this is possible without raid, but an obvious downside is 1 drive failure will wipe out all of that data, if you have anything important on there. – anvoice Aug 29 '20 at 02:43
  • Thank you for your quick response. I am leaning towards just having my 1Tb drive as the home partition and just leave the 512Gb to the OS, boot and swap partitions. A bit of a waste, but simpler. – lloydc61 Aug 29 '20 at 02:54
  • Advice: Over-partitioning is a common mistake. Separate root (/) and /home made a lot of sense...15 years ago when release-upgrades were less reliable and network backups were slower and more expensive. Separate swap only makes sense for hibernation; Ubuntu moved to swapfiles years ago. Travel: Do you really want to be backing up 1.5 TB of data over a hotel WiFi? Or letting border agents scan your laptop (for hours)? – user535733 Aug 29 '20 at 02:55
  • Thank you user535733. Sorry, but not too sure what you mean by the travel comment, are you implying it is unwise to use a linux laptop as a travel device? – lloydc61 Aug 29 '20 at 03:06
  • It's unwise to have a large-capacity device as a travel device...if you will be crossing certain borders. – user535733 Aug 29 '20 at 03:08
  • I used to have my /mnt/data on HDD and / (root) on SSD. But larger SSD gave me room for all my data on SSD. So now I use HDD for backup and more / for test installs. You can have data partition(s) and link folders into /home. So then it seems like data is in one partition but really is in another. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1013677/storing-data-on-second-hdd-mounting & https://askubuntu.com/questions/1058756/installing-all-applications-on-a-ssd-disk-and-putting-all-files-on-hdd-disk – oldfred Aug 29 '20 at 03:36

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There are few different things you could do:

  • Switch /home over to your new drive (probably the best idea)
  • If you set up LVM during install, add the new drive as a physical volume (PV) to your existing volume group (VG). Then create a new logical volume (LV) for /home.

This is the exact use case for LVM: you have an abstract idea of a storage pool that can map to multiple drives but you, the user, don't care about which drive your data is on. The downside here is that if either drive fails, you lose your data.

Brian Turek
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