Hi, I’ve been thinking about switching from Win11 to Linux Mint due to Microsoft collecting lots of data. My current setup has been cobbled together over the past decade and consists of a C drive NvME, 1 old SATA SSD, and 2 HDDs. I have games installed across all of the non-C drives, some from steam some not.
Windows tells me each drive by letter. I installed Mint on a virtual machine to get a look, but it couldn’t read any of my files. I don’t want to wipe my C drive without knowing that at least the other drives will be readable if I make the switch.
How does Linux account multiple hard drives? I’m so used to how Windows does it that I’m worried about switching over and losing access to my other drives. Thanks!
Linux doesn’t do the drive letter thing. Instead, you have to identify the disks by their partition IDs.
When you install your OS, you’ll be able to
mountthe disks to wherever you like. If you want, you can create directories in/mnt, like/mnt/e,/mnt/fetc. Then you can mount your disks according to those letters.The main issue you’ll run into is disk format. NTFS will work, but its poorly supported.
To get a better idea of how it works, try passing a USB disk into the VM you’ve created.
I have used NTFS on my external drives on Linux for longer than I care to admit with absolutely no issue.
As have I, but I wouldn’t say its always been no issue. But there have been known performance issues, and filesystem locking issues when dual booting (I know, not OPs concern). I think its worth a warning at least, so OP doesn’t go in blind.
It works, but performance suffers for games etc.
My main use case for it is storage, so it makes sense that I never noticed any issues.
They rewrote the in-kernel support for NTFS a while back, and it works much better now. The old driver lacked proper write support and was kind of questionable in general.