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I have several spinning disks in my computer, adding up to a combined 2TB, which I used to have as my /home partition with a small SSD as /

Then, I got a 1TB nvme drive, and I wanted to use a chunk of it for my new / and the rest for /home as well, but now I don't know how to combine them seamlessly. Googling around I usually find 3 kinds of answers and none really seem to fit:

  1. Mounting the SSD and HDD in different mountpoints: This is the most common answer, and would let me keep using the nvme at full speed and not lose storage, but now I would need to shuffle the data around as I use or stop using it.
  2. Just grouping them all under a single lvm: In this case, I would keep capacity but I would miss on the nvme speeds.
  3. Using the nvme to cache the HDD: It's also recommended often to use things like lvmcache or bcache to speed up the HDD using the nvme. But this usually assumes the nvme drive is really small compared to the HDD, and in my case it would mean missing on a whole third of my total storage.

Is it possible to combine an SSD nvme drive and an HDD volume under a single volume, and have the OS move the data between them as needed, without losing much or any total capacity? Or am I stuck using one of the methods described above?

metichi
  • 897
  • If you know about what sizes your folders in /home are, you can move some folders to different partitions on other drives. This is moving everything which I do. But recently got a new larger NVMe drive & moved /mnt/data to NVMe drive. But now need to move just a /mnt/photos back to HDD as that is large & growing with grandkid photos. 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 Mar 23 '21 at 14:00
  • Seems like you have already answered your own question: No, there is no magical you-can-have-it-all solution. If there were, everybody would already be using it. – user535733 Mar 23 '21 at 14:11
  • See here to seamlessly manage multiple volumes. https://serverfault.com/questions/217666/what-is-better-lvm-on-raid-or-raid-on-lvm It comes with a learning curve, though. – vanadium Mar 23 '21 at 16:09

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