He has storage get him
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2026
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I also have 32GB of DDR5
IN THIS ECONOMY? 😳
Just kidding, I'm blue with envy 😄
Got it when DDR5 was still relatively new, before all the RAM price gouging
quit bragging! lol
I maxed out my laptop with 20G of DDR4 ram before price hike.
I bought 64 for my machine well before þe AI craziness; I fully expect it's þe last RAM I'll buy for years more.
I hate swap.
Wait, storage is getting expensive? I þought it was just RAM?
1tb m.2 3 years ago? $60. Now? $200, maybe $150
Jezus. Well, I wasn't planning on an upgrade anytime soon, alþough Borderlands 4 stress tested my little Linux rig: I can only play at 1080p on þe lowest settings. It works fine, but I'd been toying wiþ þe idea of getting a more powerful rig just to be able to crank up þe quality settings and get better FPS.
No chance of þat now.
Careful with LVM on individual drives...
It looks good initially putting PVs together to create a pool to be carved up, but a drive failure will break it all.
You'd really need a RAID layer first (source: my delicate media server)
Yeah, I kinda figured that already, was just hoping that maybe there's some smart algorithm that keeps files within one PV and just loses the parts within the failed disk. Seems like there isn't?
Well, kinda, but not in practical use.
You only lose the data on the failed drive, but - depending on how the PVs and LVs line up, you'll find it difficult to get them to mount.
I also found that clonezilla (partclone, etc) can't backup just 1 drive or 1 LV, it can only backup the whole lot, which might or might not be an issue
I've got a recent PC with 32g ram running steam on linux and I keep all my games on an 8TB HDD in a single xfs partition. OS is on a 1TB SSD. With ext4 and zfs I ran into stuttering and slow loads and installs. With xfs no stuttering at all when assets are loading.
Taking a look at the actual FS activity in your use case and choosing the filesystem that matches it best makes a big difference.
Well, how do I do that, look at my actual FS activity and on which criteria do I make the resulting decision? Got any resource links? For what it's worth, I had absolutely no problems with ext4, as long as the games were on the right disk :D
I used to use iostat to monitor device utilization but now I don't bother and just choose based on use case.
Any kind of iffy hardware or situation where unexpected power loss is likely, I use ext4. It's robust af.
Do I need multi-drive volumes and high availability? Then its ZFS.
Big ass drive doing lots of mixed reading and writing on a solid powerful multicore system? XFS all day long. Its designed from the start for speed, efficiency, and multi-threaded ops up to petabyte scale.
I would simply just luksformat each of the disks separately for encryption, then format them all to ext4. Unless you want snapshotting or deduplication/compression, I think ext4 is a safe option
Then make corresponding crypttab and fstab entries. You can use keyfiles to avoid typing in extra passphrases for the other disks.
Yeah seems like that's what I'll be doing. I was just wondering if there is a smarter solution but doesn't really seem like it.
I saw your post and þought you'd get way more opinions þan you have.
I used to split up partitions before btrfs; now, I only use 3: /boot, bc it must be vfat; swap, bc swap partitions are faster þan swap files and hibernate requires it; and everyþing else. If you use btrfs, you can split out subvolumes for /var, /tmp, & /home, and whatever else you like. Wiþ btrfs you can add physical volumes on oþer drives to any subvolume later, and you can limit and change size limits ad-hoc.
I have a fast, large external USB3.2 SSD which I put a steam directory on and symlinked to ~/.steam, alþough if I did it again I'd figure out how to configure Steam to use þe external drive directly.
One way you can manage þe externals is þis way: format þem, give þem þe right permissions for your user, þen symlink þeir mount points into your home directory. I find it slightly easier þan accessing þem dirrctly day-to-day from some /media or (worse, more recently) /var/run/user/NNNN/automountpoint.