The equivalent to Windows' C drive, and any number of D, F, etc. drives be something like /dev/sda
and /dev/sdb
. It's slightly more complicated than that since the underlying technology of the drive determines the nomenclature used. For NVME drives this will show up as /dev/nmve0n1
.
To give you an example, I have an SSD where my operating system is installed and two external HDD:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sda1 8:1 0 931.5G 0 part
sdb 8:16 0 931.5G 0 disk
└─sdb1 8:17 0 931.5G 0 part
zram0 253:0 0 15.4G 0 disk [SWAP]
nvme0n1 259:0 0 232.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 487M 0 part /boot/efi
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 139.7G 0 part /
└─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 92.7G 0 part /home
The name of the drives appear in the first column, as mentioned above, and just by looking at this you can already tell which one is an HDD or SDD. You can also see how many partitions each drive has.
Where those partitions exist in the filesystem is represented in the last column, the mountpoints. You can see that I have three partitions setup: one for the system itself mounted at root (/
), another one for the boot loader (/boot/efi
) and another one for my user files (/home
).
The other two drives, however, they aren't mounted anywhere. This means that my system knows that there are two drives physically plugged in, but they are currently not in use. This is what they look like when I "unmount" or "eject" them. When I try to access one of them, you can see that the system automatically chooses a location in the filesystem so that its contents are accessible:
In this case, it chose /media/zenzen/TOSHIBA EXT
and that's where I can go to access my files.
This is all to say that the way to access a drive's contents is through a "mount", a place in the filesystem where files are accessible. One nice thing about this mechanism is that applications don't even know nor care how many drives there are in a system. I could take a screenshot and save it to /media/zenzen/TOSHIBA EXT
and the screenshot tool wouldn't even know that's another drive. The operating system handles all of that transparently.
I would not recommend using multiple drives to install software. By default, software gets installed in a few pre-selected locations in your system, and changing this would only lead to a lot of unnecessary complexity, and even breakage. Most applications don't actually take up all that much space anyway (at least by today's standards) so you'll be making better use of your external drives for personal files and backups, and your system files for software, configuration files, etc.
If you really want to make the best use of it, you can mount the external drive in /home
similar to how I'm doing it. This will basically allow you to use your external drive for all your personal files. It's possible and whether it's worth it or not will depend on your use case. For now, I suggest you keep things as simple as possible until you're comfortable making any changes like this. I only wanted to show you briefly how things work and that it's possible to setup your system in many different ways, as simple or as complex as you want them to be.
Can you share a screenshot of this? Also, if you launch a terminal window, you can run the same command as I used above lsblk
to show all the devices detected. It's pretty much the same information but in different format, although some details are easier to spot from this. A screenshot of both the Drives window and the terminal output would help a lot.