Not choosing them, I’ve done that. I just want to make sure that I install them right and am not missing anything. What I’m doing is installing a second ssd on my desktop, and then I want to install a new distro (opensuse) on it, to use instead of my current one.
What I have now is 1 ssd, with partitions for linux (kubuntu), windows (10), and swap, and an hdd with my home dir on it. What I want is to install opensuse on my new ssd, have a second partition on there for games, keep my hdd home dir, and then be able to use the first ssd for more space, probably games too (and finally ditch windows!).
Things I’m not sure about include:
- can I keep my current home and use it with the new distro?
- What do I do with the second partition on the new ssd I want for games? I.e. How do I configure it, the same as home, just call it something different? Same goes for the new space on the first ssd obviously.
- Is there anything special I need to do to install an ssd since I haven’t done that before? Is it basically the same as installing a hdd?
- New ssd (Firecuda 530 1TB) has encryption; how will that work? Is it all automatic, or do I need to do anything special with it?
TIA
Easiest way: unplug the old one, plug in the new one, install, plug in the old one, boot the new one, move files over, unplug the new one, reformat the old one, plug in the new one, done. That ensures you don’t accidentally wipe the wrong drive at any point.
I highly doubt that that is a self-encrypting drive so no it doesn’t do its own encryption. But even if it is and does, it doesn’t mean anything to you because it will automatically unlock regardless of who’s using it unless you set a separate password and unlock it every boot.
Unfortunately that would involve a lot more physical work than I was hoping for, so not really the easiest way for me. I can’t really work on the computer where it is, so all the moving and hooking/unhooking stuff would be a real pain that I hope to minimize if possible. I was hoping that I could just boot the cd/flash drive, get a partition manager and tell it to install to the currently empty drive, and use the existing /home dir as its /home dir. But since I’ve never done anything this complicated before, I wanted to make sure how it works before I tried anything.
Also, I don’t have any files I really plan on moving anywhere, unless there’s something I need to I don’t know about? I’m sorry, it was a little confusing.
As for the encryption, “It also features XTS-AES 256-bit encryption that is enabled by default without user authentication and will prevent threat actors from reading data directly from NAND.” Whatever that means, idk.
Okay so it probably is a self encrypting drive.
You can do everything I mentioned without disconnecting and reconnecting, you just want to be really sure you don’t wipe the wrong drive.
You can probably reuse an existing /home partition. But if you don’t have any files you want to keep, why bother?