Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.

Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • It combines capacity without any fancy striping. It can still provide some performance benefit as different blocks of the same file can be stored on different drives, but it doesn’t stripe data across the drives for performance.

    It also allows you to just add more drives later. The drives don’t need to be the same size or type. You can also remove drives, provided there is enough free space to move the data on a drive to the ones that will remain.

    It really just pools the storage capacity into one big volume.

    If a drive fails, it still takes the whole volume with it tho. But as long as you monitor smart, it is fairly simple to try ejecting it from the device group before it takes the whole thing with it.



  • If you just want to combine their capacities, and don’t need redundancy, just use single mode?

    No need to use a raid mode for multi-device btrfs.

    Edit: You could also do two volumes.

    Split each drive in half. Use the first half of each drive for a raid1c2 volume to get 1.5TB of redundant storage for important data.

    Use the second half of each drives for a raid0 volume to get 3TB of faster storage for games.


  • But there are no hacks required to install it on old hardware.

    Yes there are.

    If you used rufus or ventoy, you’ve just applied them without knowing.

    Unmodified Windows 11 ISOs will refuse to install on any hardware with a CPU older than Ryzen 3000 or Intel 8000.

    In fact there are less hacks required to install / upgrade to windows 11 then there are to install any Linux distro.

    What?

    On the vast majority of systems, the vast majority of linux distros will install and run with zero “hacks” of any kind. Literally just boot the ISO as-is and have at it.

    genuine copy of windows will receive all and any updates

    No. On many machines, while windows will install just fine due to the modifications to the installer applied by rufus/ventoy, the yearly major version updates can fail catastrophically.

    A lot of hardware will update without issue, but there ABSOLUTELY is risk.

    Windows is just an os. As long as it is compiled for the correct CPU architecture, it is just as supported as any other hardware. The hardware is supported by individual drivers, normally provided by the hardware manufacturer, not Microsoft.

    You are confusing functional, and supported.

    Something can “technically still work” without being officially supported.

    Not being supported means Microsoft can make breaking changes in updates, because they made no promises your hardware would be accounted for in the future.

    Just because it works today, no longer means it will tomorrow.


  • EXT4 is your all-rounder. Unix feature complete and reliable. No actually big downsides that would make it insufficient for, well, anything.

    BTRFS is your complex and feature rich option. All the modern file system features like copy-on-write, snapshots, subvolumes, deduplication. Good for putting an operating system or user files on. Stuff you might want to snapshot or sort into subvolumes, etc.

    XFS has some neat features too, but it has one main focus, performance. The difference isn’t massive since it’s just a file system, but for the fastest transfers speeds, with the smallest CPU impact, nothing beats XFS afaik. It’s also fully unix feature complete, so it has no trouble with symlinks, hardlinks, permissions, etc. EXT4 can theoretically be faster if handling a ton of tiny files, but game files are usually above that threshold.




  • Yes. But you don’t have to switch.

    People say “start” with simpler distros because if you go past just using it as-is, and grow to understand linux closer to the system level, you’ll likely eventually end up preferring something more complex.

    There’s little point to starting at the deep end, like arch, since you don’t know whether you’ll end up staying in the shallows yet. Either way, it’s the start. It can also be the end, but that is unknowable.