Combining multiple types of HDDS & SSD Into one recognizable drive

So I'm currently running Ubuntuu 14.04 on a desktop that is meant originally as a server tower. I've put the server thing on the back burnerfor now although I would like to be able to install virtual boxes with dedicated servers on them eventually . Anyway I worked at Apple as a genius for almost 4 years and got the idea there to take the hard drive out of my laptop, put it where the optical drive goes and replace where the hard drive went with an SSD. And doing so, with a bunch of terminal commands I combined the two drives into 1 readable drive and the computer is now MUCH faster. However with Linux it looks like the combining of hard drives/SSDs is a lot different (and I am new to Linux). Currently I have a 500 GB HDD drive and a 1 TB HDD as well as a 250GB SSD. I know with the Mac it automatically optimized what should be dedicated on each drive (as far as bootable partitions vs. storage space etc.) but I'm not show sure how to format/configure it with Linux. Any ideas? Please help!

3 Answers

To answer part of your question. I have a similar setup (Ubuntu 15.04 with a 2 TB HDD and a 250GB SSD). With two drives it's easy, you simply put your root directory / on one and your /home directory on the other.

During installation, choose a custom installation and mount your root directory and swap space on the SSD. I usually dedicate 1-2 times the amount of RAM to the swap space (i.e. 16GB of RAM, 32 GB of swap space).

On the HDD select it as your /home folder mounting point.

BAM! There you have it, your system critical components are now on the SSD with the superior read/write rate, and your user files (Downloads, Documents, Music, Pictures, etc.) are on your inexpensive, large storage platform. Your system should now fully boot astronomically faster. If you ever need to store a database or serve content (i.e. an Apache Web Server), make sure to put it in a system directory like /var so the content can be accessed quickly.

Now the rest of your question. I don't have very much experience in LVM or RAID, but I imagine you could combine your two HDDs into one Logical Volume to contain your /home folder.

Note that my method does not optimize content, it is a manual configuration. By default, system items will be installed on the SSD (minus some user specific configuration files) and your files, scripts, downloads, etc. will be placed in the default directory /home/<user>/.

Happy hacking.

Regards,
Lisenby

There are several projects which allow you to use an SSD as a cache for an existing hard drive.

bcache is one of these, it caches at the block level and should give you a decent speed boost.

To install bcache

git clone -b bcache-dev
git clone -b dev 

Then, just run

bcacheadm format -C /dev/sda1
mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

A great guide for this can be found HERE.

flashcache is another project of this same type.

To install flashcache you will have to build it from source.

Download the file change to that directory and

git clone
sudo make
sudo make install

A more detaild and advanced guide can be found HERE.

This is not an perfect answer, but anyway:

Try using "RAID" on all your drives, you're not using RAID or something like "Anti-RAID", however RAID is not suitable for some times, like installing Windows, and maybe the entire Ubuntu except if you use a type called "Software RAID"