Setting up for Dual Hard Drives [Solved}

Hey guys, Katie here once again.
First, thank you for the wonderful support and for helping me cross over to the world of Zorin. I’ve been struggling with Linux for over four years. It’s been tough, mostly I think (and hope), because of hardware issues, specifically cheap Lenovo Thinkpads. My e11 could hardly run Windows, leave alone Linux. And my x230 was also problematic.
On my recent trip to Florida I decided to bite the bullet and acquired a Clevo N141ZU, dual drive: 250 Gb SSD and a 1Tb HHD. I have the Intel i7 processor with 32 Gb of RAM installed.
Currently the Clevo has Ubuntu/Mate installed as root on the SSD. There is nothing on home, the HHD.
Obviously I want Zorin 15 (and nothing else), as root and I already have the ISO on a live flash drive.
I’ve done a bit of reading on the process involved setting up the partitions. Nothing I’ve found is specific to Zorin but they talk about a special tool in Ubuntu that supposedly makes the process easy. I don’t know if this extends to Zorin. Also, I installed Gparted if that helps.
I’m still a newbie when it comes to Linux. Is there any specific tutorials that will walk me, step by step, through this process? With 32 Gb of RAM, I figure a small SWAP file of about 6 or 8 Gigs should be fine without worrying about hibernation issues.
I have a few other questions about working with a dual hard drive system but those can wait.
Any thoughts, assistance, encouragement, and direction, most appreciated.
Katie

Hello Kay-Dee,
1st, go back to Florida... Don't know where you live (NY here), but if it's north, weather can't be as good as Florida... All problems are easier to deal with down there..haha

If you're going to just use Zorin on the 250GB SSD, ever think about just using the 1TB HHD as 'Storage'. I run Zorin on a 1TB HHD (and I've had as many as 3 OS's on just the 1 HHD) and use the other 1TB HHD as 'Storage' for pics/movies/back-up. You said the 1TB HHD is blank?

If it was me. I'd unplug the 1TB HHD. Install Zorin on the 250 SSD (and wipe it clean during install/format disk). When you're all done plug in the 1TB HHD and format it to Fat-32. When I had 3 OS's on the 1 drive, I'd use the extra 1TB HHD as storage for all 3. So no matter what OS I used, I could access the storage.

Jeff

With SSD you have to set up TRIM manually (Windows does this automatically. There is no need for swap on an SSD. I would put root on the SSD and format the HDD for /home and formatted to Ext4. I would format Root on SSD to Ext2 to prolong the life of the drive. Whatever you do never use SSD for storage of data because it creates space by scrubbing what was on there which means you will never be able to recover data. Ext3 and Ext4 are journaling File systems like NTFS. This means a higher rate of rewrites. FAT32 will reduce your effective storage capacity and M$ are trying to enforce patent rights on FAT32!

http://www.webupd8.org/2013/01/enable-t ... s.html?m=1

You may need to setup 50 Mb of space for EFI/ESP at the start of the SSD if the BIOS is EFI enabled.

Thank you both. Yes, this is precisely what I want to do. Run Zorin on the SSD and use the HHD for storage. It would seem that the first step is to determine whether the Clevo is running in UEFI mode. Let me determine that first and hopefully we can proceed from there.
Katie

Yes. The Clevo is running in UEFI mode. Please, where do I go from here.
Much thanks,
Katie

OK, when you start the 'something else' install option, you need to create a 35 Mb ESP/EFI partition at the start of the SSD - this has to be Ext4 from recollection - I would plump for 50 Mb. This should be the first partition on GParted (left most). Next create '/' as Ext2 for the rest of the SSD. Create '/home' on the 1 TB hdd formattedt to Ext 4.
Once installed you need to setup those CRON jobs for TRIM for the SSD - the guides I posted earlier.

Okay, Smarf... I'll give that a try. If you don't hear from me, you'll know I screwed up
Thumbs up...
Katie

Swarf, is there a benefit to doing it the way you just explained to kay-dee as opposed to just keeping HHD as extra storage?

Yes. If you had /home on the SSD with all the rewrites it would shorten the life of the SSD AND because the way SSDs are super efficient at overwriting old data if you deleted something in error you will never get it back. That's why I'll never use one even for an OS because "All good things come to those that wait!"

Still doing my homework, here, but getting close to the change to Zorin.
The screenshot is the SSD drive (/dev/sdb), with the Ubuntu OS installed. The small partition at the left, ringed in green (the cursor is pointing to it), is the UEFI partition presently installed (information appears in the window). My system is running in UEFI mode so my question is can I retain that 512 MiB partition? Then delete the partition with Ubuntu and create a 2GB swap file and a third partition with Zorin installed?
The second, HHD drive, (/dev/sda/), is just one large empty partition for storage. Can I leave that alone or do I have to re-create it?
And finally, do I do all this from the Zorin live stick (select “something else”), or do I start by opening Gparted?
Much thanks,
Katie

OK, let's be clear, SSD's do not require 'swap area' at all, period, due to their nature. The 512 Mb efi partition can be kept. Manually I would make your entire SSD (space that is left) as '/' formatted to Ext2 - Ext2 is not a jounaling file system and will not keep writing to your SSD like Ext3 or 4 would, shortening it's life. Your empty 1 Tb Hard drive should be marked as /home, formatted to Ext4.

Got cha... And thanks as always, Swarf.
Katie

If you wanted to access the /home drive from a different OS your alternative would be to set up a FAT32 or NTFS partition and use Obmin.

https://vimeo.com/user15592214

see also from this point onwards:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=13803&hilit=Obmin&start=20#p60749

Hi Swarf, I finally took the plunge and installed Zorin on my two hard drive system. It took five tries and I’m not sure how I did it or if I did it right. I think not. I typed lsblk in the terminal and the screenshot is what came up. sda is the 1TB spinning HDD for storage. sdb is the 236 SSD for the Zorin OS.
By looking at this, can you tell if everything is installed correctly? How can I tell if my work is being stored on the correct drive? Let me know if there are any other commands you want me to run.
And much thanks for all your help,
Katie

Well looking at the partition labels it would appear to be correct considering the sizes and how they are labelled labelled. However my only query is that it appears to have labelled the data disk as sda when I would have expected it to be sdb. Whether this is a hardware issue/bus issue due to the nature (physical) difference of the drives I don't know. You could check that home is in correct location by booting with Zorin in live mode and then open Nautilus and browse to the hdd and check all your /home folders are present.

Thanks Swarf. Yes, I thought the same thing: That sda and sdb were swapped around. But that's how the computer came (with Ubuntu on sdb), and I had enough on my plate setting up the drives without screwing with the labeling. Let me run this for a bit and solve a few other questions I have before going back into the Partition Manager.
Thanks for all you help,
Katie

im now in the same boat trying to setup zorin on a system with a SSD and a HDD and so i was wondering , you said to set the SSD as ext2 and then setup TRIM afterwards but does ext2 support trim ?

NotXea wrote:im now in the same boat trying to setup zorin on a system with a SSD and a HDD and so i was wondering , you said to set the SSD as ext2 and then setup TRIM afterwards but does ext2 support trim ?

Yes, it does.
It's not as smooth and efficient as ext4, but that is kind of Swarf's point: It prevents constant write and rewrite on the solid state drive, which helps prevent damage that shortens the life of the drive.

Aravisian wrote:

NotXea wrote:im now in the same boat trying to setup zorin on a system with a SSD and a HDD and so i was wondering , you said to set the SSD as ext2 and then setup TRIM afterwards but does ext2 support trim ?

Yes, it does.
It's not as smooth and efficient as ext4, but that is kind of Swarf's point: It prevents constant write and rewrite on the solid state drive, which helps prevent damage that shortens the life of the drive.

alright thank you so much