[Wylug-discuss] Booting from external SSD ... Your thoughts and experiences?

[Paul Brook]

> That's largely because when I last tried to boot from USB on a regular
> basis (possibly up to 5 years ago) I found a lot of old
> non-USB-supporting BIOses around, and booting from GRUB on a CD was
> similarly painful.
> 
> So, have things improved? Or is booting from external USB drives still
> a bit of hit-n-miss?

Depends whether your clients are still using the same PCs they were 5 years 
ago :-)  Pretty much all vaguely recent machines will support booting via USB. 
Then again there's an awful lot of people still running windows XP on fairly 
antiquated hardware.  Lots of modern machines don't have any other way of 
connecting external media, especially since the advent of netbooks, etc.

Even assuming you have a machine capable of booting from USB, there are other 
issues with this plan:

- All bios control this differently.  Many allow a one-off choice, others you 
have to make a permanent change and remember to switch it back afterwards.  
Making a machine boot off USB by default isn't going to win you any friends.
- If the bios has been password protected then you're completely screwed.
- Do you really trust you distro to handle whatever random hardware you throw 
at it?
- Do your clients have a spare machine? Many companies don't have desktop 
machines.  It's one-per-employee laptops with docking stations.
- Many of the companies I work with are very security conscious.  The idea I 
should hijack one of their machines - hardwired to their internal network, and 
probably holding sensitive data locally - is going to get me laughed out the 
building.

My worry is that while success gives you a fairly good working environment, 
failure is catastrophic.  i.e. when you turn up on site and the machine 
doesn't work, your only option is to go home again.

I'd say a small(+cheap) netbook and request use of a monitor+keyboard if 
that's too cramped for prolongued use was a much better bet.  It's a 
requirement that can be easily explained, and is hard to get wrong.

> If booting from external drives is now more viable, can I just stick
> an SSD in an external eSATA/USB caddy? ... or do I need to by a
> specifically 'external' SSD at twice the price (for a GBP 5  caddy).

The "external" SSD is almost certainly just a regular SSD in an enclosure.

The most important factor is probably the quality of the enclosure.  In my 
experience £5 caddys are what you'd expect for the price.  They work, but have 
flimsy connectors and generally poor build quality.  If you're carrying it 
around and replugging it all the time you probably want something a bit more 
robust.

High-end enclosures may support USB3 and eSATA. This may currently have 
limited applicability on-site, but handy for things like doing backups to your 
home machine.

Preinstalled elcosures may be more compact.  There's no real standard on the 
thickness of 2.5" drives.  An SSD is likely to be slim, whereas a general 
purpose elclosure will be designed to accomodate fat multi-platter rotating 
drives with twice the thickness.

Paul