Asus laptup with 2 hardrave, brfs opt in, impermanance and encryption

Hello everyone,

I got a laptop with 2 internal hard drive, one ssd of 240GB and one hdd of 1terra.

I was happy to try single encryption btrfs with opt-in persistence as misterio do it, but the double hardrive make probleme to me, ans i cant figure what would be the correct way to do it.

I want my swap, root and if i make one, my home encrypted.
I really want to try the opt-in persistence.

Should i create a home partition on the hdd ? Use lvm to create a volume group with both drive ? I’m open to suggestion !

You could use the ssd as a cache with LVM or bcache, and install btrfs on top of that.

The more sophistication you add, the more headaches you will get. I recommend starting with what you need, and leaving the rest for a later time when you have a clearer idea of what you want.

The first thing you can do is forget about the 2nd drive (the HDD) and install NixOS on the SSD with three partitions: EFI (vfat), swap (LUKS), and root (also LUKS with BTRFS on top). If you use the same passphrase for both LUKS containers you can unlock them both by entering the passphrase only once.

That will get you up and running with encryption-at-rest with “minimal” fuss. From there you can tackle the impermanace if you still want it, and you’d have an unused HDD to work with. Perhaps you’ll even decide to move /nix to your HDD to free up space on the smaller SSD :slight_smile:

The moment you start combining multiple drives with logical volumes or BTRFS devices… unless you really need that stuff, more likely than not you’d be setting yourself up for a world of hurt in the future.

I had a laptop with two SSDs which I set up in a mirrored configuration with BTRFS. What it cool? Hell yeah! Was it useful? Nope.

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