So, basically I’d like to replace the /home with different hard drives. I have a 4tb one that I’m using for videos, a 1tb I’m using for audio files and video games (not the actual game installed there but for example executables or ROMs), and a 500gb I’m using for texts and images. My idea would be to not have the /documents folder and so on and have a drive for everything. Can I do this?
With linux you don’t have drives, at least not in a sense that you’d have in Windows with C:, D:…
You absolutely can have /dev/sda as your operating system drive, /dev/sdb1 mounted on /home/nomad/Documents, /dev/sdc1 mounted on /home/nomad/Videos and so on. Or use whatever names you wish. I had this kind of setup for years before changing the whole hardware with drives big enough to hold all the data (and a NAS, but that’s another topic).
Another option is to use LVM which allows you to manage available storage space more flexible, but that will mix your data across multiple drives even if they have separate volumes (roughly equivalent to traditional partitions).
And no matter which option you choose remember to have backups (and test that they work) since all the hardware will eventually fail.
If getting into LVM, I highly recommend going the extra mile and going ZFS. You have as many mounts as you want with pretty much any parameters you could want, encryption, case insensitive, compression, you name it. And if you end up really needing a partition, vdevs gives you that, and they only take the space that’s actually used. So if you make a vdev for a VM and the VM uses discard/fstrim, it releases all that space back to the host transparently.
I’ve had so many weird problems with LVM especially mirrors and raid. Even snapshots are kinda bleh. I’d take btrfs subvolumes over LVM. It’s barely any more flexible than a regular partition table…