Having done a memory upgrade to my HP EliteDesk 705 G2 SFF system, it was time to add more storage. It came with a 256GB SSD, and I added the 512GB that I had taken from an old laptop. Since I was leaving the original drive in place and simply adding a drive, the process was much simpler than in the drive replacements I have done. The whole thing would have been trivial if I had put the new drive in an external USB 3 adapter. USB 3 is fast, but imposing the USB/SATA conversion would add some overhead, so I decided to open up the machine and make another SATA connection. There was a free SATA power connector inside, but I had to add an extension cable to reach any plausible place to put a new drive. Fortunately, there was a free SATA data cable already present. I put the new drive into a 2.5″/3.5″ mount, but there were no holes to screw it into the obvious place. This is a problem I have faced before, and I used the same remedy: Duct tape.

Afterwards I used gparted to create two partitions on the new drive, one (ntfs) for Window and another (ext4) for Linux. These used less than 1/3 of the drive, leaving the rest for future work. The system had an Ubuntu 20.04 installation. I used the procedures in How to Move Your Home Folder to Another Partition [Linux/Ubuntu] (starting about halfway down) to move the /home directory to new partition. This went generally well, but I got a couple permission errors from the command sudo rsync -aXS /home/. /media/home/. . One was about a directory that I clearly did not want copied anyway, and the others seemed to be about obscure temporary files. So I went ahead and finished the procedure. I then rebooted without errors and the system seems fine.