Are there any drawbacks to having a separate SSD mounted as /home?

The Water Cooler
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This is more of a general Linux question rather than related strictly to Fedora, but I dread asking any newbie Linux questions in places like Reddit.

Are there any drawbacks to having a separate SSD mounted as /home? I know that having storage and backup drives as separate mounts works fine, but I’m not sure if there may be any possible limitations of having /home on a separate physical disk. Such as, can there be any programs that would recognize /home as being a separate device and so they’d fail to work properly?

See, the reason for my doubts is that, coming from Windows, I’m unsure, because when you redirect your home directory in Windows to another drive some programs would ignore the environmental variables such as %LOCALAPPDATA% and insist on having an absolute path to C:\Users\User\AppData and would keep creating these folders on the C drive ignoring the AppData folder in my redirected home directory.

I’m pretty sure that Linux doesn’t have such problems, but it can’t hurt to ask.Thank you.

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In short, it’s not a problem and it’s a commonly used approach.

If you are at all worried about certain things not being accessible on boot properly, you can also choose to keep /home on your root drive and use the second drive for large directories that you would keep under home, such as Downloads, Documents, Pictures and Videos etc.

It’s up to you!

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Thank you. Sounds like the way to go then. I like the idea overall as I won’t have to copy my home dir from backup after reinstalling the system and I fully expect to be reinstalling the OS several times in the beginning :slight_smile:

I already have a separate storage drive for some of the largest files but I still like to keep most of my stuff inside my home directory, it’s just the way my head works. Maybe with time, once I get used to the way Linux works, I’ll change my storage habits.

Thanks!

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There are advantages to having one large storage pool, e.g., the Fedora Workstation default with root and home as btrfs subvolumes. There are ways to add a separate device to an existing pool with btrfs or lvm+(some legacy filesystem).

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I don’t understand BTRFS, ZFS, etc., it’s all voodoo to me, so I’m keeping things simple for now: 1 device=1 filesystem, no fancy stuff, pools, etc. Therefore, I don’t use Fedora defaults and I format everything as EXT4 during installation. For now, my testing machine had /home on the same volume. I’ve just done a Fedora 41 reinstall last night where my /home is now on a separate SSD and my storage drive is mounted inside my home. It works, but I needed to ask if this is the right approach.

I’ve ran Debian and Ubuntu servers as a hobby for many years only on EXT volumes and simple layouts, Nextcloud and web servers mostly but I’m still basically a noob to Linux, on the desktop in particular, and the switch from Windows is not easy, due to 20+ years of habits and lots of files, application alternatives to find, etc.

So, for now, it’s all EXT4, because that’s what is familiar and I need some familiarity as I feel somewhat overwhelmed already.

I know BTRFS has advantages but it will come later, once the dust settles down :slight_smile: