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My laptop has two hard drives in it. And I want to install Ubuntu. Here's the thing, I want my SSD to be the hard drive that boots my system and allows it to run. I want the OS and system things there for the speed. Then, I want any downloads, documents, etc. To be on my separate HDD. Does anyone know how I could do this. Yes this is similar to my other question but that one was about how Ubuntu handles separate drives and this one is about how I could install Ubuntu with two.

yoyoyo
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    While doing the installation, you can specify what devices are for and how to arrange them. What you'll need to do is have your spinning disk mounted as /home –  Jan 27 '21 at 22:39
  • I'd suggest using the "Something else" and setup exactly what you want. You can create mount points for any directory you like, having them share drives/partitions with other things, or have them on completely different drives (including over spread over tens of drives, or devices). I don't see how separate drives complicates things (my own systems use network storage as my other drives allowing me to share files between multiple systems) – guiverc Jan 27 '21 at 22:47
  • FYI: "Install with a separate /home" is a standard QA (Quality Assurance) testcase for many flavors, it's up to the person running the test if they use a different drive or just different partition on the same drive, as the results are the same; the operation the same.... One or multiple drives does not change anything except for how you select them on the installer. On boxes with a single drive I run the test using different partitions, on boxes with multiple drives I use separate drives - no difference. – guiverc Jan 27 '21 at 22:52
  • Would setting it to /home cause the HDD to run all the time. Also I read somewhere it could things run slower? @guiverc – yoyoyo Jan 27 '21 at 23:00
  • Files located on a HDD will be slower due to drive latency regardless of directory unless they're already cached. You've provided too little detail (applications being used, RAM etc need to be taken into account) to know if that's the case; but the something else option lets you setup exactly what you need, for your use case (which will likely be different to my own; we all use different apps to achieve different things thus have different setups; thus I suspect most of us use something-else unless we're newbies or a generic setup will do almost as well (ie. it's not worth changing). – guiverc Jan 27 '21 at 23:35
  • You may also find parts of the accepted answer to this question useful. – user68186 Jan 28 '21 at 00:51

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A lot of the desktop applications in Ubuntu offer by default to save things in subdirectories of your home directory, such as Documents, Photos, Videos, etc.

You could do your install so that /home is mounted on your HDD with everything else on SSD. That way you don't need to think about how things are laid out.

Alternatively, you can do a simple install entirely to the SSD and then afterwards mount the HDD somewhere like /srv, and just remember to save your stuff in there.

There are pros and cons to each method. I would probably go with the second because I'd want things in my home directory to perform well and could use my own judgement about where large files get stored.

So assuming you will go that way, do your install and get the desktop up and running how you like. Then open the "Disks" application and see what device name corresponds to your HDD. It will probably be either /dev/sda or /dev/sdb.

Now you know what device you want to mount, follow the community instructions on installing a new hard drive. Just mount it somewhere like /srv/media or /srv/documents or whatever. Don't forget that after mounting the filesystem you will have to change its ownership to your own user so that you can write to it without having to become root.

grifferz
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