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| Goodbye Windows, Hello Linux [advice needed for a Linux workstation at home] |
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| thermistor-guy:
--- Quote from: edy on January 22, 2019, 01:00:49 am ---... While most people would laugh at this old hardware, it is now saved from landfill and this family can enjoy new life out of this computer which they thought was otherwise useless. --- End quote --- I keep my family's PCs running for as long as possible, by doing simple repairs and cheap h/w upgrades, often using spares from my junk box; then wiping Windows and installing Linux. My everyday home admin PC is a 2007 Dell laptop running a Linux Mint LTS distro. It can't run games, but it can run movies. Older h/w can have a high build quality, well worth preserving. In a jam, when your main machines are down, e.g. because Windows has upchucked over your disk, you have a work-around. One of our Win7 PCs crashed the other day and wouldn't boot. Windows stalled for hours in a repair attempt. So I booted a Linux Mint live CD, and used GParted to do some partition repairs on one of the drives. The system booted and tested fine after that. My kids saw this; they don't want to use Linux, because their friends don't, but they now think Linux is pretty cool. <Sigh> slowly, slowly ... |
| RoGeorge:
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. So far it was very helpful for me. Now, I'm in the process of freeing up the SSD in order to make room for a clean install. Very time consuming this sorting out of what to keep and what to delete. Also, keep moving chunks of folders from the SSD to all the other storage places (NAS, USB sticks, external HDDs, internal HDDs, cloud storage, even SD cards) almost made me completely loose track of what I copied and where. Being the kind of data hoarder I am, it all ended up buying a 8TB disk, and calling it a delayed Santa and not hoarding. ::) Questions - Inside the PC's case, there is a 512GB SSD. I will ask about this one later. - The 8TB HDD will most probably stay outside the PC's case (the motherboard has an external SATA connector, with power). 1. Already decided to use GPT, and don't bother with MBR any more. How to partition an 8TB HDD? A single partition, or many? Or just made one reasonable big partition for now, and let the rest for future partitions or resizings? 2. What file system to use? 3. I am planning to drop NTFS completely for the 8TB disk, yet most of the old data that will populate it is coming from NTFS partitions. On Windows, there was only one user, so I am not concerned with preserving the Windows access rights. Is there any good reason to still keep using NTFS for the new 8TB? Later edit: I would like to preserve the file date, thought, at least the creation date. |
| stj:
long term computer users learn to keep stuff they want/need in specific named folders. it makes things a hell of a lot faster for backups or upgrades. of course Linux helps by having a "home" root-folder. unlike winshit that scatters everybody's stuff all over the damned place. my documents? my files? everybody's files???? what satanist came up with that storage plan??? |
| radar_macgyver:
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---- The 8TB HDD will most probably stay outside the PC's case (the motherboard has an external SATA connector, with power). --- End quote --- Would suggest not doing this. Over time, I found eSATA connectors' latches get flaky and cause attached disks to generate ATA errors. I prefer to have my drives internally mounted and if I care about the data at all, with a 2-disk mirror (using mdraid or btrfs). --- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---1. Already decided to use GPT, and don't bother with MBR any more. How to partition an 8TB HDD? A single partition, or many? Or just made one reasonable big partition for now, and let the rest for future partitions or resizings? --- End quote --- No partitions necessary. This artificially imposes limits on what you can do, and has no benefit on modern filesystems. When using btrfs, you can instead use subvolumes with quotas so that, for example, you won't end up with a root filesystem with no space left. --- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---2. What file system to use? --- End quote --- btrfs would be my pick. It has its flaws, for example it has bugs in the raid5 code but works very well for a single disk or a mirror. One of the better aspects is how you can 'attach' a mirror to an existing single disk, and detach it later if needed. Another really cool feature is copy-on-write, which lets you snapshot ('freeze') the filesystem while making backups. I use this to periodically back up my btrfs filesystems to a network drive. Once the initial copy is finished, you only send the changes which can be quite fast. I have a cron job set up to do the incremental backup once an hour. I also maintain snapshots the last 48 backups (on the remote disk) in case I screwed something up and want an older version of a file (similar to Apple's Time Machine). --- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---3. I am planning to drop NTFS completely for the 8TB disk, yet most of the old data that will populate it is coming from NTFS partitions. On Windows, there was only one user, so I am not concerned with preserving the Windows access rights. Is there any good reason to still keep using NTFS for the new 8TB? --- End quote --- Nope. NTFS drivers in Linux had to be reverse-engineered, unlike native ext4, btrfs etc. You also lose the ability to store file permissions. |
| HoracioDos:
--- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---1. Already decided to use GPT, and don't bother with MBR any more. How to partition an 8TB HDD? A single partition, or many? Or just made one reasonable big partition for now, and let the rest for future partitions or resizings? --- End quote --- At least two: a) OS b) /home (It allows to update your linux version or distro keeping your personal data files out of trouble) Some additional: c) /virtualbox for VMs d) Swap. I still like a swap partition instead of a swap file. e) FAT32 for backups --- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---2. What file system to use? --- End quote --- Ext4 should meet your needs --- Quote from: RoGeorge on January 23, 2019, 02:59:38 pm ---3. I am planning to drop NTFS completely for the 8TB disk, yet most of the old data that will populate it is coming from NTFS partitions. On Windows, there was only one user, so I am not concerned with preserving the Windows access rights. Is there any good reason to still keep using NTFS for the new 8TB? Later edit: I would like to preserve the file date, thought, at least the creation date. --- End quote --- If there's only one user, it seems there's no reason to keep NTFS. I would make some disk image for your old windows system and I would keep it in a FAT32 Partition. |
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