On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 06:18:17PM +0000, Tim Johnson wrote: > Greetings: > > This is a "what if" question: > > suppose I buy a computer with one hard drive bay. > Example: dell c521. > I might initially partition the existing hard drive and put the > current debian on one partition, sharing that hard drive with > windows vista. > > Now then, suppose in the coming year, I consider getting a USB > hard drive, plugging it into my box and installing the (then) current debian > on it. What kind of performance/issues can I expect to find? > Not sure what you mean by "performance/issues", but I'll take a stab.
If it is USB2.0 (which I gather it is unless the machine is 10 years old), then performance should be OK. Your hard drive will likely not even be able to fill the 480 MB/s which the USB can handle. As far as issues, if your machine can boot from a USB device, you are doing fine. If not, you might need to install Grub to the main hard drive and point it at the USB device for booting your Linux install. However, I am not familiar with how exactly this works. Perhaps someone else can comment on this? Other issues you might encounter include things like your /etc/fstab and perhaps some other configuration files needing modification to reflect the new location of the Linux install. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sánchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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