decided to do the migration from Fedora to Nix, I knew that the jump would be something but wasn’t expecting hardships right on the start.
my laptop which I installed it to has two storage units, one 512GB SSD and one 2TB HDD, back when I installed Fedora I could select both units on the install when installing the system and have a total of 2.5TB of storage, the Nix installer however presented me with only the choice of picking only one, I picked the SSD.
so, how should I mount or somehow “append” the other hard drive to my overall system/home folder like in Fedora? I also am using FDE and I’d like both disks to be under the same encryption, thanks in advance and I hope this can be easily understood
Ah, this comes down to filesystem selection. The graphical NixOS installer sets up ext4 by default to my knowledge, while fedora offers btrfs by default these days.
If you combine your disks with the fedora installer, it sets up a btrfs-style RAID0 by default (you can read more about it here).
This isn’t a straightforward choice in multi-disk setups, because coupling a slower disk with a faster one can reduce the effective speed of the faster one. So when you use an installer, some will choose the option that has less potential for unintended consequences, while others choose the option that just does what the user thinks they want. The NixOS installer is more along the former.
Anyway, the point is, what you’re asking for is how to partition your disk with btrfs instead of ext4. NixOS’ graphical installer will let you format the disk as btrfs if you choose the option, I believe.
I don’t know if you can ask it to create a RAID0 once you select that option, but if you can’t it’s really easy to add the second disk after installation (as explained in the docs I linked earlier). You just need to set up a btrfs volume on the first disk to begin with, which you probably did not.
There are other ways to accomplish this, e.g. with LVM, or a “real” RAID0. All of them require some forethought at partitioning time, though, so you’ll have to reinstall first (and do a bit of research to understand what you want - btrfs is likely the best option for generic desktop use, but you might want to do some research into how btrfs schedules your files into the two volumes, to make sure that this matches what you want in terms of performance characteristics).
Just an aside: you’ve duplicated this exact topic on reddit. Please don’t have two separate communities trying to answer the same question, it’s not respectful of other people’s free time.
FWIW I think this forum is a far better place to get help (certainly in terms of the general quality of answers regarding technical questions).
yeah apologies for that, didn’t knew the discourse forums and, decided to ask it here too since I thought it would give faster answers, going forward I plan to ask it here more.