Hello. I am slowly collecting parts for a new computer that I want to build, and when it’s done I’ll be attempting to completely switch over to Linux. I will be using it as a personal desktop machine, primarily for gaming, maybe some coding, virtualisation, and video editing on the side.
I have some questions regarding Linux’s filesystems, whether or not it makes sense to get more RAM to benefit the filesystem that I will end up with, and what the best way to use my Intel Optane M.2 would be.
After Wendell’s video on Intel Optane I got curious and got myself a 118GB P1600X, but now I am left wondering how I can best apply it in my system. Do I install Linux on it and use it only as a boot drive? Do I use it purely as a cache drive, using something like a Linux equivalent of PrimoCache? Do I create two partitions and attempt to do both? I am basically wondering how I could get the most use out of a low latency storage device like this.
Using it only as a boot drive would would presumably mean that I would only experience better post times. If I were to use it for caching, I’m not sure if I would also get better post times. If I attempt to do both by creating multiple partitions I am afraid I might end up running out of space at some point, and I’m not sure how much cache space would be ideal for 1 or 2TB of storage.
As for filesystems, I don’t know much about them, but I know there’s more out there than NTFS like you mostly see on Windows. I read a little bit about ZFS and BTRFS and also about some of the filesystems using more RAM than others, which is detrimental for old/low-end systems but resulted in higher speed/response times in higher-end systems. My questions are now as follows: What decides which filesystem you use, is this decided by choice of distro or do you get to choose regardless? Which one should I aim to get for my use case? Would having more RAM to allocate to this filesystem benefit its performance?
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Oh boy, are you in for a ride. I mean this in a positive way, since there is much to learn with Linux. First of all the filesystems that is most notorious to use a lot of RAM is ZFS (BTRFS is similar to some extend, but does not use much RAM currently), but for the start I would advise against using it. I am a fan of ZFS and like to recommend it, but to reap the benefits you need to know what you are doing, and when you are not confident in what you are doing on a Linux system it can be somewhat of an extra headache.
For the start get your feet wet with Linux and use one of the easier to manage filesystems like ext4 or xfs, at least that is my recommendation. Those are plain old filesystems which have no requirements a 10 year old system could not manage. ZFS (and BTRFS) have features that go beyond that of classical filesystems. They offer on-the-fly compression and integrety and combine features that were previously independent, ZFS can do what a RAID card could do back in the day for example and much more.
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Hey, thank you for your answer! I’m cautiously looking forward to switching. I’ve had my fair share of Linux related headaches from using my Raspberry Pi so I’m not entirely new to it, but it’s fair to say that I have no idea what I’m doing. I consider myself a power user and every now and then I like to get into the nitty gritty of new computer related things, but I suppose doing that with something as big as a filesystem on a daily driver wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do!
I was mostly considering it because I don’t like doing things over very much, so I generally don’t look forward to reinstalling my entire OS and setting everything back up again (unless there are tools that make this really easy that I should know about?). Since I’m building a high-end system anyway I figured I might as well make use of it.
I’ll look into the filesystems you mentioned and keep them in mind!
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for somebody new to Linux, i wouldn’t at all recommend using any of the feature-rich filesystem formats. especially if your build is already one where memory size is a concern. i have always recommended ext4 for new people, or just anytime you want a fast and lightweight filesystem on anything that isn’t an sdcard.
ext4: old reliable.
as for your headaches using the RPi, thats par for the course with ARM. this coming from my years of experience building my own smartphone ROMs.
really easy way to backup an ext4 system: boot a live image, and dd the boot drive to an image on a separate drive.
for disk caching, id have no good advice. ive always used the defaults for single-device storage. all my multi-device arrays are set to battery-assisted writeback.
Memory size isn’t exactly a concern, I’m getting at least 32GBs. I was just considering getting even more if it was in any way advantageous performance wise, since there are now kits of 2x24GB for example.
I’ve used dd to back my RPi up before but it doesn’t seem like an optimal solution for big drives, since I believe you make an image of the entire drive, empty space included?
2 for ext4 so far, definitely noted!
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Hello world,
I didn’t have enough time to read all that so it might be said already.
Optane is for today’s standards outdated and slow and really bad €/P ratio.
I thought about boot drives and all that, having tried all kinds of combinations on my PCs. What I found most comfortable for my operations was two or three NVME M.2 SSDs with more than 256GB (because of OS and home drive is going to grow). So “exempli gratia” You could get a Intel 660p (500GB) split it into 4 partitions if you going Linux, UEFI(could be best to have on it’s own drive, maybe get optane for this?), SWAP, HOME, ROOT. The 500GB will do enough, but I would probably have the HOME on the second drive. While having the other two drives for Games and other projects. On Windows it is going to be one drive for all four partitions on a 1TB and have the rest for anything else. Because if you don’t stay clean like me then your 500GB will be mostly Discord Temp data or Office registries and Squirreltemp logs. You will have to do some black magic to seperate Users data and root data in Windows onto seperate drives.
Going raid, just makes it harder to hotswap components and annoying if you just need a few games onto your friends’ pc for a day.
In any case, I’m running 2 NVME M.2 SSDs, 3 HDDs and 1 SATA SSD. Call me crazy but it works and going to replace those 1-2TB HDDs is going to be expensive. And I also wanted to go Optane but it just isn’t worth the money nor the time.
I already have the Optane drive, so I might as well give it a shot. Putting the OS and the other “main” folders on different drives or partitions is food for thought. I’d be interested in hearing what others think of this as well. I’m not familiar with UEFI other than the UEFI BIOS, what exactly would I be putting on the optane drive here in this case?