Multi-disk partition questions

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I have some installation questions. If these are not appropriate for these forums, I apologize. Also, this is what I understand from what I’ve read, but I don’t want to get hip-deep and have had a massive misunderstanding over something basic that really turns into a disaster.

What I want to do is have 3 sets of data on 4 disks:

Disk 1: Base Filesystem (root, swap, etc) (Smallest current disk easily available, xxxGB)
Disk 2: “/home” (Around 640gb-1tb)
Disk 3: “/?” Various Media (Media of Various Types: Video, Music, ISOs, etc) (~2TB)
Disk 4: “/?” Continuation of Disk 2 (~2TB)

Basically, I want to make sure I understand that if I install my system as a split root/swap on disk 1 it will stay on disk 1. (So if it crashes it doesn’t affect the others.) And in turn I can specifically mount Disk 2 as “/home” and it will only hold “home” info. (Separate from anything else.)

And lastly, what’s the common way of placing huge amounts of media as a mount-point. Is it typically a subdirectory somewhere, or a common name elsewhere? (Example “/personal-files” - with sub directories such as “…/music”, “…/video”,”…/iso”, etc) If it’s a subdirectory from the root, can I set that as a mount point for additional disks as needed? (The last point was never pointed out directly in anything I’ve read so far.)

When I add additional disks and give them the same mount point (ideally as in the case of disk 4) will it just add to the storage?

Thanks for any help.

#2

You would be better using LVM for a setup such as this. You are then not stuck with particular hard disk boundaries and can set up your partitions more flexibly.

#3

Thanks! LVM sounds like exactly what I needed for the two TB drives.

The confusion I’m having after reading everything is what does OpenSUSE do if you just add a drive through the gui and not do LVM? In the past I’ve always had specific mount points in mind (and did so on a disk I just installed on a current machine - “/vm-images”) but it seemed like the current installer would have just added it otherwise. If so I was confused as to where.

#4

It is YOUR system and YOU decide where you need the disk space and thus where you mount it.

If e.g. the diskspace is is for movies of a particular user *john *you can mount it at /home/john/music (and create the directory with *john *and his group as the owner, etc.).

If it is for a general database you could mount at /database.

It is all up to you to do something intelligent :wink: . Remember that the mounting (and the decisions about it) are taken by the systems manager (as root) and that the normal user will not see if he works on an other diskpartition or not. There is but ONE big directory tree in Unix/Linux.

The following might be a bit too basic and you may already understand all of what is on thhis page, but I nevertheless refer to SDB:Basics of partitions, filesystems, mount points - openSUSE