Is it ok to split home on another drive? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey folks. I recently got an old X220 with an mSATA SSD. I plan to to install Linux on there. It doesnt matter which OS: Debian, Ubuntu or Arch. The machine is so old that all distros play nice with it.

Anyway, the speed on the mSATA is slower than the 2.5 SSD. So I want to know if is it possible to have your /boot, /efi, swap on the mSATA. Then, the /home on the 2.5 SSD? Any problems with this setup and if anyone tried it before?

Now, for the reasons why I use mSATA instead of just putting Linux on 2.5 SSD:

the mSATA is Samsung, pretty rare nowadays. The health is still very excellent. I checked with CrystalDiskInfo. So might as well use it.
My X220 has a problem finding out grub if installed on the 2.5 SSD. It's literally a 50/50 chance it can find grub properly. So:

a) you installed Linux on 2.5 SSD, reboot.

b) grub error screen

c) restart

d) boot into Linux well

Note at d) if I do anything to restart/shutdown the computer, you are back at step b) and require another reboot to reach Linux.

Any advice is welcome.

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[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

The machine is so old that all distros play nice with it.

Lmao, I'm using X230 as my on-the-go laptop unironically. Also FYI, older machine might not work as well. RHEL based distros have started to remove the support for Sandy & Ivy in their next releases.

To answer your question, Linux doesn't care which drive you put your /home. Hell, you can even mount /var or /usr on a different drive. It only care that you list it on fstab (or mount it manually, go to town!). It would just treat them like any other filesystem.

I've never heard of that 2.5 SSD being problematic for boot drive before.

this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025

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