Hey folks. I recently got an old X220 with an mSATA SSD. I plan to to install Linux on there. It doesnt matter which OS: Debian, Ubuntu or Arch. The machine is so old that all distros play nice with it.

Anyway, the speed on the mSATA is slower than the 2.5 SSD. So I want to know if is it possible to have your /boot, /efi, swap on the mSATA. Then, the /home on the 2.5 SSD? Any problems with this setup and if anyone tried it before?

Now, for the reasons why I use mSATA instead of just putting Linux on 2.5 SSD:

  1. the mSATA is Samsung, pretty rare nowadays. The health is still very excellent. I checked with CrystalDiskInfo. So might as well use it.

  2. My X220 has a problem finding out grub if installed on the 2.5 SSD. It’s literally a 50/50 chance it can find grub properly. So:

a) you installed Linux on 2.5 SSD, reboot.

b) grub error screen

c) restart

d) boot into Linux well

Note at d) if I do anything to restart/shutdown the computer, you are back at step b) and require another reboot to reach Linux.

Any advice is welcome.

  • gandolfini_the_grey@lemm.eeEnglish
    4·
    20 hours ago

    First, of course it is completely fine for /home to be on another drive. As long as it is configured in /etc/fstab correctly, almost any configuration of drives and partitions is okay.

    Second, your boot issue sounds very strange. Firstly, x220 has a traditional bios boot, right? So you do not need an /EFI partition, and should install grub to the reserved space on the drive for booting (which if you configured MBR for your drive requires no change, if you configured GPT you need to reserve that space). If you have one of the x220s with libreboot (not sure if that exists, but I used to have an x200 with libreboot flashed for the bios), then your grub version might be very out of date, which could cause issues as well.