[Swlug] Freeing space on my SSD

[Dave Cridland]

On Sun, 13 Aug 2023 at 14:09, Rhys Sage via Swlug <swlug at mailman.lug.org.uk>
wrote:

> I'm running out of space on my e203ma and want to transfer my user account
> data to SD card in order to free the SSD for actual programs and the OS.
> Transferring the downloads folders would be good too. I'm not sure how big
> of an SD card I can use but it'd be worth getting a big one in order to do
> this.
>

You can mount additional filesystems at a specific point in a parent
filesystem, so /home/rhys for example could be on the SD card filesystem.
But SD cards are slow, so you'd want to consider carefully what you'd put
on them, plus removing the SD card would be pretty disastrous. In
additional, I wouldn't use a removable drive like that without encryption,
which rapidly becomes a pain - though on a laptop that's probably pain
worth bearing anyway.

My first consideration would be whether I could replace the internal drive.
My laptop runs Windows (there's a lengthy discussion there about why), but
it wasn't hard to swap out the NVMe on that for a considerably bigger one.
Although some laptops have "soldered in" drives, most are replaceable,
although your warranty may be affected. You'll want to get yourself a USB
adapter for the drive type (NVMe or SATA/SSD), buy the new drive in the
same form factor, and/or investigate Clonezilla to actually handle the
switch for you. For Linux, I'd probably install fresh on the new bigger
disk, and plug in the old via USB to extract the files I cared about, but
YMMV.

For some figures, a WD SN580 NVMe drive - a very capable budget model, I've
bought three of the previous SN570s over the years - can be bought for
under £100 for 2Tb (and under £50 for 1Tb). For desktop users, I'd opt for
one of those plus an adapter if you've no NVMe slot, for laptop users you
have to go with whatever your manufacturer has decided, of course, but a
2.5" SATA SSD is at least slightly cheaper.

If replacing the internal drive is not an option, then you'll have to go
the removable media route. SD cards are only up to 1Tb (technically, SDXC),
and those are pushing £200. External USB-C drives vary wildly in
performance and cost, but SSD-based ones do seem more expensive - I'd stick
with an NVMe and an enclosure (the enclosures cost around £20, making me
wonder why an SSD-based external drive costs so much more...).

Dave.
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