joker.iki.fi

We use both Windows and Linux at work and don’t have any official corporate policies on how to set up the work laptops. Of course you need to make sure that backups are done regularly and all customer information should not be carried around or should be encrypted with secure methods, but other than that, it’s pretty free. Most technical people use Windows and Linux and also other Unix systems. For me, the most important ones are Linux and Windows, with the option to switch between each with a single reboot.

In general, the options are:

• Partition the laptop HD and install a typical dualboot setup
• Use Live / persistent Linux together with windows (Live from CD or Persistent from USB)
• Use Linux and run Virtual Windows guest OS
• Use Windows and run Linux as virtual guest OS
• … and many others

Although virtual machines are nowadays very flexible and easy to setup and configure (I’ve mainly used VMWare and XEN, and looked at KVM), I only prefer to use them in scenarios where I need to test multiple servers on same laptop when doing some work with distributed systems which need to be relatively well isolated of each other, but can’t dedicate hardware to each separate box.

When I don’t need multiple OSes running parallelly, but rather want to just run Linux on top of hardware, I don’t really like the classic dual boot setup with both windows and Linux using the same physical disk. I don’t go into details why I don’t like this setup, but the most important is that it’s really annoying to guess how much space you’re going to need in the long run, and having more than two OS’s (like three or four), is going to make even the largest laptop hard drive look crowded.

So much for the background. I decided to try setup a dual boot system in such a way, that Windows would live on the laptops internal SATA drive and Linux would occupy the Transcend 1.8″ Portable Solid State Drive, which connects to the laptop using the eSATA port. This installation is not going to bother the windows side of things and is going to run directly on top of the hardware. The laptor is Dell Latitude E6400, which is really good laptop with technical specs I am happy with.

Very Good Thing (TM) is that the BIOS on the laptop allows me to boot from various devices so I didn’t even need to mess with the master boot record on the first disk which hosts windows. Because of this, the installations was really painless, as easy as if you would install Linux on the secondary hard drive of your PC. Just say during the installation which disk you want to use (/dev/sdb in my case).

Now to the really important thing: how does it perform?

The specs on the Transcend eSATA SSD promise me this: Max Transfer speeds (eSATA) Read: 90MB/s Write 50MB/s. Below are some comparison values:

#> hdparm -t /dev/sdb reports me that the read speed is 88,5MB/s. This is really impressive as hdparm reports 72,6 MB/s for the internal SATA drive. So the eSATA interface is at least as fast as the internal SATA hard disk, when it comes to reading. This is still quite far away from read speed of my software RAID5 array which I use at home for storage (about 180 MB/s). But it’s still a lot better than using persistent linux from USB stick or something like this.

I need to perform some write speed tests when I have more time. But at least for now, it seems like the dual boot setup with external SSD drive, as long as it connects with eSATA, is very good choise. Of course there’s the price - the SSD drive, of size 64GB that I used, costs about 150 euros. After installing linux (KUbuntu 9.04 Desktop) I still have 52 GB free (swap uses 4 GB and user files 3 GB and then there’s some FS structures). This makes the price per free GB close to three euros, which is of course much more expensive than for example using a 0,5 TB internal SATA disk.

However, keeping in mind that:

• There’s no more room for internal disks in the laptop
• (I have understood that) external drives consume almost the same amount of power
• I don’t need to spend time tweaking all sorts of installation options that typically come with persistent USB installations
• It’s faster than anything else (as far as read speed is considered)
• It’s not really that expensive for business use

This type of dual boot installation makes a lot of sense to me. And then if I need to install for example, RHEL or SLES, I just get another drive and install on top of that - I can be certain that the installation will not break any existing installation, this really makes a lot of sense. (And if I find out that it does not make sense in the long run, rest assured that I’ll be ranting about it in the future).

I’ll update some images of the installation here when I find the time.

It’s again been a while since my last update and the reason, once again, NO TIME. At work I’m no longer at probational period, and work has started to pour in. Currently the workload is rather good, not overwhelmingly much but enough to keep me busy. Surprisingly lots of travel. I have travelled more during this four months than in last year. It’s still ok and I am still confident that this was a right choice for me. Workwise, I get to do more concrete things now than before - less powerpoint and more technology.

Homewise it’s been ok. It’s not too dissimilar from the situation at work. The family keeps me again very busy but there’s a direction for the better now. Even my wife is not anymore constantly sleep deprived and she really has enjoyed her part as stay-home mummy.

Finnish summer is again what you would expect and I have managed to find some free time again, so I guess I should not complain. Let’s see where I am in a month or so…