This laptop of mine that I purchased just over two years ago has the ability to have 3 storage devices. I have previously described what I’ve done in it with an mSATA and the 2.5″ SSD. Between the two, I have 995 GiB of storage, 101 GiB for root using the mSATA and 894 GiB on the 2.5″ drive. That was fine and all for normal things, but VMs do require a lot of space and so a lot of space I needed. Although I do often use my optical drive, it’s not as often as I use VMs so I decided to get a caddy and install a third drive in this 14″ chassis laptop.
Here is a short video on how simple the process is… and another reason to play around with Kdenlive. In short, adding a hard drive is as simple as:
- Insert the drive into the caddy
- Secure the drive using the set-screws but be careful to not over tighten
- remove optical drive from the computer and insert hard drive (SSD) caddy into bay
- Bob’s your uncle
Really… why?
The main reason is, I need more space for virtual machines. I’m sure for normal people the two drives is more than adequate but I have to play. Most people would probably just clear out the old virtual machines after they were done but I am guilty of data hording and probably need to get that under control. I also don’t have much interest in wiping or possibly interfering with how my laptop is running as openSUSE Tumbleweed works so fantastically well on it.
My process is, I try out the Linux distribution virtually to obtain some general impressions, test out a few things, check the memory usage and so forth. If I find it exceptionally interesting or want to test a use case, I take it to the next level and put it on some hardware. I find it a more efficient use of my time to do my first round of testing virtually before I meddle with the metal.
It also doesn’t help that I am more likely to use Virt Manager with Qemu which uses Qcow2 drive images and they take up more space than VDI images from VirtualBox. Since I tend to get a better feel for the distribution using Virt Manager, especially with Gnome based desktops, I am more likely able to give them a fair shake. Consequently, I need more storage space.
Final Thoughts
Despite the fact this laptop is older, I can’t seem to find another comparable 14″ machine that has the drive flexibility that the Dell Latitude E6440 has. I do wish it had some kind of refresh to allow for a faster CPU with lower power utilization but that is just not the demands of typical users these days. For now, I will continue to use this laptop as I have intended. If I do another modification to this system, it will likely be to upgrade the CPU to the highest performing 35W TDP processor that is available.
References
Hardware Thing Video on YouTube
Dell Latitude E6440 Running openSUSE Tumblewee
Cool post. I was reading about samba setup, then came here to more pages on your blog, October. Can you describe (again) why you use virtual machines? There are machines with ddr4 ram speeds, for like $150, check out refurbanana on Amazon. Just curious, in case, about …I know trying out various Linux distros, Your other posts, Virtual machines (Vm) are quintessential, but any other uses?
Cool post. I was reading about samba setup, then came here to more pages on your blog, October. Can you describe (again) why you use virtual machines? There are machines with ddr4 ram speeds, for like $150, check out refurbanana on Amazon. Just curious, in case, about …I know trying out various Linux distros, Your other posts, Virtual machines (Vm) are quintessential, but any other uses? …trying to post again….not sure first one made it.
I use VMs because I am, frankly, lazy. The time to download and do a first pass test is pretty quick. If I particular enjoy it or it just happens to really fascinate me, I’ll move it to real hardware.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!