Ok, so I have a weird setup, but if I could get this shit to work, it would be crazy.
First off, I have one of these
The neat thing about that is, your hard drive can be ejected very easily. And a new one inserted. It also has a spot for a slave drive that can do the same thing.
Right now, I’m using ZorinOS as my daily driver. I don’t know how exactly I became a Linux user, but, I guess at this point I’ve been using it daily since the week of Christmas 2024. Which was like 6 months ago now.
Anyways, self realizations aside, I have an idea. I’ve installed Lutris on this install, and I have run out of room for my games. I also have an 8TB hard drive I’m not using.
My plan is to use the 8TB hard drive to do nothing but install games to. Then have Lutris look for the games on the slave drive. Now here’s where it gets interesting.
What if that 8tb drive gets filled too? Well, I could buy a SECOND 8TB drive!
What if I install Game 1, Game 2, and Game 3 on SSDSlave1 and then I install Game 4, Game 5 and Game 6 on SSDSlave2.
So now, I’m playing Game 2. But I want to play game 6. So I just turn off the PC, swap slave drives, and turn it back on. And now, it’s ready for me.
Oh, but we’re not done yet.
I’m using SSDMain1 with ZorinOS with Lutris installed. What if I swapped hard drives to SSDMain2 with Mint with Lutris installed? Then whichever hard drive is inserted is what dictates what games I can play. Like an old school NES except now for modern systems.
So, recap. Slot 1 should be able to swap between OS’s,
And slot 2 would be able to swap between games.
With any combination working, since they’d both have Lutris installed.
Is that possible?
A couple thoughts. Assuming your motherboard is capable of SATA hot-swap and has it enabled (look in your BIOS), you should be able to umount the game drive, and swap it without shutting down. Assuming the game drives are partitioned using GPT, you should be able to add individual entries in /etc/fstab using the partition UUIDs and control mounting and umounting to specific mount points for different drives. Personally, I would add the noauto option to those entries, so that mounting is done manually and can be controlled easily.
OS drive swapping may be simpler, depending on your BIOS. With the system powered off, swap the drives and assuming the BIOS picks up the new boot partition cleanly, you’re off to the races. The only issue would be if the BIOS just doesn’t want to recognize one of the drives’ boot partitions. I had this issue with my Arch install and my MSI motherboard. The motherboard won’t recognize the default install location and I had to move the boot files around to work in a fallback mode. Annoying, but solvable.
Finally, as others have said, this could all be a matter of over-complicating things. Why not just stuff all the drives in the case and always have everything? You can configure the primary drive’s boot loader to let you pick between which OS to boot. And you can have any and all data drives mounted at the same time. Unless you are struggling with physical space or power requirements, it saves on having to muck about with swapping stuff.
Welcome to the 90’s,when this was a thing.
You can do this, but why not just mount the drive inside the case? Usually there’s plenty of connections, with space being the concern. I’ve mounted drives with a single screw to places they clearly don’t belong.
By the time you fill one drive most likely the next gen of drives will be out with a lower cost per TB anyway and you could just move all to that.
Is that possible?
I used to do that on my desktop (swapping OSes), using a very similar bay.
You should even be able to hot-swap the game drive. No reboot needed.
Software-wise, yes, it’s technically possible. I’m not familiar with that drive bay, but as long as it’s properly unmounting and then mounting drives that come in and out, it’s should be fine.
