Arch Linux

69Hussein69

Member

Registered: 2025-12-15

Posts: 5

Storage Management Suggestions

I have a very small ssd 128GB to be precise. and that meant every byte matters. my strategy so far in arch linux has been very simple, don't install anything you don't need and uninstall what you think you will never need. create a bunch of symlinks for files that you move the hdd (at one point I moved ~/.cache and was wondering why my system was dying xD).

I was wondering if there is a better way to do this. like a tool that magically moves packages that I specify or entire apps or libraries. seriously I'm very lost on this. this isn't something that requires documentations (unless I missed it and I probably did).

the other thing (minor) how do I reliably identify if moving a specific file/package would hurt my system.

I did move my pacman cache to my hdd via pacman conf which can be problematic if my fstab entry were to be gone.

I just typed whatever came to mind sorry if this post is in the wrong corner and thank you for reading this unnecessarily long post that I didn't bother to trim down ;)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,585

Re: Storage Management Suggestions

Out of curiosity, what are you using this for?
Is it a learning exercise?  Are you trying to run a desktop environment?

Or, is this a small server or an embedded system running only a console?

The strategies will likely be driven by the use case.

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69Hussein69

Member

Registered: 2025-12-15

Posts: 5

Re: Storage Management Suggestions

Out of curiosity, what are you using this for?
Is it a learning exercise?  Are you trying to run a desktop environment?

Or, is this a small server or an embedded system running only a console?

The strategies will likely be driven by the use case.

I see it didn't occur to me to disclose this. just a desktop environment on my old laptop and learning on my way too. but if we want to talk real usage it's surfing the web, wasting hours tinkering thus breaking things just to make them work again and lastly gaming.

I currently don't need my laptop for work and it's very old anyway so I took the opportunity to learn how to use linux since I want to leave windows behind.

okay I have a dell precision m4800 with mSATA 128GB SSD (very slow for a SSD and has no cache), and  725GB HDD. I also have core i7 4th gen cpu and 8gb of ddr3 ram and lastly a quadro K2100M gpu. I'm currently using kde plasma both x11 and wayland.

EDIT: typos

Last edited by 69Hussein69 (2026-01-17 08:20:08)