Fun and games with 3TB hard drives

[Daniel B. Thurman]

On 10/02/2011 08:40 AM, Newbury wrote:
> To Daniel Thurman
>
> Why fight with physical hardware limitations?
>
> Install Virtualbox (it's free) and create as many bootable virtuals as you want, each reachable without a physical hard-on-the-hardware re-boot. And from my experience the actual boot times of the virtuals are only about 50% of physical boot time for the same OS on the same hardware, ignoring BIOS initialization. Plus you can archive a copy of the vdi file for a near instant 're-install'. 
>
> Geoff
I did try VB when it came out at the time, but found it quite
difficult figuring out all the nuances from partitions to networking
and so on.  I guess I was not ready to invest the time in Virt when
I wanted to focus more on development.  So, I stuck with what I am
most familiar with.

As it is,  I have 3x2T hard drives, Drives 1 & 2 are manual semi-mirrors
of each other and 3 is for staging and testing of new OSes. Managing
these are a pita, but it works.  I have had drive 1, or drive 1 partitions
wiped out only to recover from drive 2 or drive 3.  Were it a mirror, I
would have lost both.

As for the 3T hard disk, I was not willing to be a guinea pig, wasting
time fiddling with the 2TB boundary, and unknown older OS nuances
and to stick with what I am familiar with, so I ended up with a 2T drive
with SATA-3 and a 64MB buffer for the same price as the 3TB drive.