UEFI is required for Windows I believe. There's no reason to dump it if you're comfortable with making it work. I have no experience with it at all, but I know it works fine with Kubuntu. Search the forum for UEFI posts from QQMike - he's sort of the local expert on that.
As far as your devices, with that many and that much storage capacity there's a lot of choices. With BTRFS you can add and subtract partitions or whole devices from a single file system so you have a ton of flexibility.
I personally use my fastest device for swap and the OS. Assuming your M2 drive is the fastest, I'd make that your boot device and put swap on it too. How you configure the others will depend greatly on your needs. Windows will not be able to read BTRFS file systems so if you need to share files so keep that in mind. Also dynamically sized container files like swap files and dynamic virtual drives have potential to become corrupted if stored on a btrfs file system. My personal choice is to maintain an EXT4 partition that I use only for Virtual Box drives.
So lets assume 1 Windows install with all it's goodies, any number of Linux installs, and enough backup space to cover everything. Here's how I'd configure:
M2: 3 partitions: EFI Partition, SWAP partition equal to RAM size, Remaining amount BTRFS.
Install Kubuntu and GRUB (the boot manager) to the BTRFS partition on this device. Eventually - Rename the Kubuntu BTRFS subvolumes (this requires some editing of grub.cfg and fstab) to something unique so you can install other Linux distros to the same BTRFS file system. I say "Eventually" because you don't need to do this until/unless you install other Linux distros.
SSD#1: Duplicate the M2 drive partitions. Have this drive bootable also in case the M2 drive fails. Use the BTRFS partition on this drive to store backups of your Linux installs from the M2 drive. This is your Linux backup.
SSD:2: Give the whole drive to Windows. also make this drive bootable using the Windows boot manager. Add the two above bootable Linux installs to the Windows boot manager.
HDD: Divide this drive into partitions. A 250GB partition to backup Windows, a 500GB EXT4 partition for Virtual Machine storage and the remainder for large volume storage like videos and music.
Alternate ideas include;
Mirroring (RAID1) the M2 and one of the SSDs using BTRFS instead of a backup device. The only downside here is if a device fails, you can only mount the failed RAID file system once in degraded mode to replace the missing device, after that it goes to Read-Only, which isn't the end of the world, but it can make recovery a bit more work.
Use the M2 for Windows and join the 2xSSDs in a BTRFS RAID0 configuration and use the 2TB hd for backups.
As far as your devices, with that many and that much storage capacity there's a lot of choices. With BTRFS you can add and subtract partitions or whole devices from a single file system so you have a ton of flexibility.
I personally use my fastest device for swap and the OS. Assuming your M2 drive is the fastest, I'd make that your boot device and put swap on it too. How you configure the others will depend greatly on your needs. Windows will not be able to read BTRFS file systems so if you need to share files so keep that in mind. Also dynamically sized container files like swap files and dynamic virtual drives have potential to become corrupted if stored on a btrfs file system. My personal choice is to maintain an EXT4 partition that I use only for Virtual Box drives.
So lets assume 1 Windows install with all it's goodies, any number of Linux installs, and enough backup space to cover everything. Here's how I'd configure:
M2: 3 partitions: EFI Partition, SWAP partition equal to RAM size, Remaining amount BTRFS.
Install Kubuntu and GRUB (the boot manager) to the BTRFS partition on this device. Eventually - Rename the Kubuntu BTRFS subvolumes (this requires some editing of grub.cfg and fstab) to something unique so you can install other Linux distros to the same BTRFS file system. I say "Eventually" because you don't need to do this until/unless you install other Linux distros.
SSD#1: Duplicate the M2 drive partitions. Have this drive bootable also in case the M2 drive fails. Use the BTRFS partition on this drive to store backups of your Linux installs from the M2 drive. This is your Linux backup.
SSD:2: Give the whole drive to Windows. also make this drive bootable using the Windows boot manager. Add the two above bootable Linux installs to the Windows boot manager.
HDD: Divide this drive into partitions. A 250GB partition to backup Windows, a 500GB EXT4 partition for Virtual Machine storage and the remainder for large volume storage like videos and music.
Alternate ideas include;
Mirroring (RAID1) the M2 and one of the SSDs using BTRFS instead of a backup device. The only downside here is if a device fails, you can only mount the failed RAID file system once in degraded mode to replace the missing device, after that it goes to Read-Only, which isn't the end of the world, but it can make recovery a bit more work.
Use the M2 for Windows and join the 2xSSDs in a BTRFS RAID0 configuration and use the 2TB hd for backups.
Comment