Combine SD w/ Internal Storage?

Eddie Paul Litz

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Is it possible to combine SD Storage w/ internal storage, if so, how?
 


An sd card is usually found in an android phone or a camera.....may pc's have a slot to read an sd card.....how did you propose to combine them ?.....give details please.
 
i've got a cheap H.P laptop with only circa about 5 gig spare on internal HD and that was after shrinking SWAP partition and extending root install partition.However I have a 14 gig SD card that stays in the SD slot of PC. I haven't added it to /etc/fstab nor set it up as /home but its an extra 14gig that I drop and drag stuff to ,that i don't want clogging main hd. For instance I develop codeigniter4 in apache using virtual host config. I cloned certain dirs from apache to the SD card for back up. All i have to do is cd into copy dir on SD card , run
git fetch
git merge

and I have a up to date back up of dev should anything happen to HD and other stuff like code that I can't remember .Thats one useful way of extending HD capacity
 
The SD card will always be physically separate from any other physical storage. However, you can effectively extend a high level directory to cover a sub-directory on another storage unit.

I've done that in the past where /home was on /dev/sda2. and /home/multimedia was on /dev/sdb1. Both were listed in /etc/fstab. Where "home" shows up in Dolphin (I use Kubuntu), I can go up and down anywhere within the "home" directory structure, seamlessly. /dev/sdb1 is still physically separate, and no one file will be partially in /home and /home/multimedia, but managing the filesystems such as backing up /home becomes a one line entry.

Not perfect, but some flexibility.
 
An sd card is usually found in an android phone or a camera.....may pc's have a slot to read an sd card.....how did you propose to combine them ?.....give details please.
I have a Chromebook w/ Ubuntu on it and there is 5.1 gigs left of 16gb. I have a 32gb SD inserted. I would like to expand the internal storage to have more space on it.
 
There's a form of RAID that allows you to extend your partition onto a second hard drive, essentially making the 2 of them 1 drive. However, this wouldn't be suggested in your situation, because the read/write speeds of the 2 are dramatically different. You can move data onto the SD and mount it somewhere, like moving your /home contents to it and then mounting it as /home in the /etc/fstab. However, you could never take it out as you wouldn't be able to login without it or your computer session would become unstable if you removed it while logged in.
If you decide to do this, you need to boot to a USB drive, then move home, edit fstab, then reboot without the pen drive. Make sure your /home permissions are the same before and after the move or you won't be able to log in.
 
In the "old" days. Almost every file system was on a different drive.
I had a slackware system back in ...umm I think about 94 or so.
/ was on 760k floppy drive. (That's not a typo. kilobytes)
/var was on a second 760k floppy drive. (I think I had swap here too)
/usr was on a 1.44k floppy drive.
This ran in 2meg (yep... 2 MB, not a typo) of RAM.

My first hard drive was 5MB. I always wondered how I was ever going to fill it up.
There was only 32 bit Linux, because there were only 32 bit CPUs. My first
linux system ran on a 486. I finally moved up to a Pentium and a 2400bps modem.
The modem was so slow, I could almost type faster than the characters were displayed
on the screen. A web page with one small 256x256 pixel graphic took about a minute to display.

Oops, sorry diverged there a bit. Anyway, you can still put each file system on a different device if you want to. Most people want /home to be the biggest filesystem. You could move that off to a different device.
 
There's a form of RAID that allows you to extend your partition onto a second hard drive, essentially making the 2 of them 1 drive. However, this wouldn't be suggested in your situation, because the read/write speeds of the 2 are dramatically different. You can move data onto the SD and mount it somewhere, like moving your /home contents to it and then mounting it as /home in the /etc/fstab. However, you could never take it out as you wouldn't be able to login without it or your computer session would become unstable if you removed it while logged in.
If you decide to do this, you need to boot to a USB drive, then move home, edit fstab, then reboot without the pen drive. Make sure your /home permissions are the same before and after the move or you won't be able to log in.
I tried this & it didn't work. Anybody have any ideas on how to get it to work?
 
For RAID. The drives should be the same size. Otherwise it defaults to the smaller of the two.

But there is also something called logical volumes. LVM let's add more drives to a disk volume, they can be different sizes.
 
I have HP PCs w/ AMD x64 Drives
 
It's possible that it didn't work because the driver to mount the SD didn't launch before fstab was read. If that's the case then you can't do anything other than store your files there after the OS is up and running. So basically move all your downloads and documents to it. You could create links in your home directory to it and then your apps would automatically save there instead of on your hard drive. So you could move your ~/Documents and ~/Downloads to the SD, delete ~/Documents and ~/Downloads, then create links to your SD/Documents and SD/Downloads or any other folders taking a lot of space.
 

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