Laptop Upgrades and Exploring OS's on Removable Media Part 1 (Acer Upgrades And Linux on a Thumb Drive)

 

Laptop Upgrades And Time For Windows 7 To Bite The Dust

So I have a Acer Aspire 5733 laptop that I've been making upgrades to. The laptop came with a Intel Pentium P6200 dual-core processor running at 2.1GHz, a 500GB, 5400 RPM drive with 4GB's of RAM, and a battery that's been abused to the point of lasting only 10 minutes on its own juices. For that intended upgrade to Windows 10 that has yet to happened, I decided that this machine would need a massive upgrade to accommodate the latest of Redmond's offerings. As such, parts were ordered off of NewEgg. A new battery to replace the 10 year old workhorse  arrived and now I can get 2-1/2 to 3 hours off of a single charge. The RAM was upgraded to 8GB's. The memory upgrade only cost around $40 while the battery cost $15.

The Hard Drive
The laptop is used primarily for Facebook, YouTube, and Blogging. During my seasonal office job, it's also used as a office machine outputting various PDF, Word, and Excel documents along with the online applications. As such, the task that performed on the Acer doesn't require massive amounts of disk space. I don't use this laptop for games. Of the 500GB volume, I typically hover around 300-350GB GB free, and that's after 10 years of use.  I never worried about running out of disk space on my current setup.

As such, when I decided that the laptop HD was going to be upgrade, I decided to go with a SSD (Solid-State Drive). For those who are less tech inclined, SSD drives is essentially a flash drive in a hard-drive form factor. It's a storage device that uses integrated circuits and their are no moving mechanical parts, like a flash drive.

This is in sharp contrast to a hard disk  drive where their are moving parts and the drive contains thin, round platters that contain the data. Their is a mechanical drive-head that scans the platters reading the data on them. Since solid state drives don't have mechanical parts and are based on computer chips for storage (with much faster seek/read times), they perform much faster than a standard hard-drive. The drive-head of a mechanical drive has to constantly scan the platters reading data, which results in degraded performance and constant wear that will cause drive failure down the road. Because SSD drives don't have moving parts, they have a significantly longer life expectancy than a hard disk drive.

Despite the huge pluses that SSD's bring to the table, their is one major disadvantage (that's rapidly being overcome) though: price. At a similar price-point, SSD's offer a lot less storage than their mechanical counterparts. Thus, these drives are significant more expensive unless one buys a smaller capacity drive. Recreating my 3 terabyte desktop setup as a SSD configuration would cost around $250. Recreating a similar 3 TB setup using two (1TB and 2TB) brand-new 7200 RPM drives would cost around $90 (Seagate BarraCude ST1000DM010 andST2000DM008respectively on NewEgg) at the time of this article.

A purchaser can have both price and performance up to a certain point. At that point though, the user must determine what's a higher priority; capacity or performance. On my desktop machine, I host several virtual machines, videos, music, and games. As such, the priority for that machine is going to be capacity. On my laptop, which again, is used for mostly office work and the Internet (which doesn't consume mountain-loads of disk space), I can make performance the main priority.

When it comes to making performance the priority, SSD's have become very economically viable and offer enough storage without feeling the squeeze. Originally, I decided to order the drive in October. However, with the unexpected early demands, I decided to hold off on purchasing the drive until early January. The busy Winter Season is the absolutely the worst time to perform a hard-drive upgrade. Seriously, what in the Hell possesses people to perform upgrades at the busiest time of year. Do computer upgrades either before or after the Holiday Season not during!

Getting past that small rant, I waited til things calm down before ordering the new drive upgrade. When I did order my new SSD, I went with a Silicon Power Ace A55 SSD with a 512GB storage, matching the capacity of my current laptop drive. I paid $53 for it (not bad at all for the capacity). When that drive came in, I wondered if their was anything in the box because it felt empty. Sure enough, their was a drive in their. the drive case is made out of plastic, while the components weighed next to nothing. 

In the meantime....
I wanted something to try until I ordered by SSD. Their were brief glimpses of free time to carry out such experiments. With the cyber Monday sells, I've purchased a few USB thumb drives for my Linux experiment. I spent $4 each for two 32GB drives and $8 each for two 64GB thumb drives. These  thumb drives are USB 3 Compatible. However, this isn't a selling point for me as the USB ports on the laptop, being 10 years old like the rest of the machine, still conformed to the USB 2 standard. One can't upgrade the USB ports in a laptop.

I didn't want to accidentally install Linux on my Windows drive instead of the USB stick. As such, I took it to my desktop machine and created a VMware Player Linux configuration, and capturing the thumb drive within the VM. For the experiment, I chose SparkyLinux as it's more lightweight compared to the full-fledged Linux distro's like Ubuntu or Redhat Fedora. Being more lightweight also means I have a lot more control over which software packages are installed on my setup.

The selling point of SparkyLinux is it's advertised ability to support many more window managers than most other distros. Within the Linux/Unix world, a desktop manager provides the general look and feel of for the environment in use. While one can install different desktop managers on Ubuntu, I wanted to use a distro that only came with the very basic and them upgrade to something more functional when need be, and not start off with the kitchen sink already included, so to say.

Using my VMware Player VM, I've installed SparkyLinux on my USB thumb drive. I don't actually remember how long the installation took because 20 minutes into the setup, I went to eat supper. When I came back an hour later, the install was almost complete. It finished about 15 minutes later. The thumb drive was removed from my desktop, plugged into the Acer laptop, powered on  with me hitting the "F12" key on the BIOS screen to bring up the boot menu. The USB thumb drive was detected and the boot process started after hitting "Enter".

From their, I waited, and then waited some more, and then their was more waiting after that. It took Linux about 2 minutes to boot into the login screen. It then took another minute for LXDE to load. LXDE is a very lightweight desktop manager used in many Linux distros. I was surprised. For a solid-state device, this is very slow. The performance was much slower than what I expected. I thought that it would have been much faster given that USB thumb drives are solid-state devices.

It took longer for Linux to load from that USB thumb stick then it took Windows 7 to boot and load from that 5400 RPM drive. Going online, I've discovered that USB drives were very slow due to a whole variety of reasons. The page "Why are USB flash drivers much slower than SSDs?" is linked below and provides a very in-depth examination of the topic. One thing that has to be mentioned is that while the speed of the USB port is a contributing factor, it's actually not the deciding one, though, as their are many other factors at play.

I was always under the impression that USB thumb drives, while not being as fast as SSD's, should be faster than a 5400 RPM hard-drive. Linux on a flash drive wasn't going to be a thing.

Now, I could have loaded a ISO images on flash drives using the Rufus utility in Windows and that image would have booted from the USB port in a acceptable amount of time. The main issue though with this approach is the ISO image is read-only, and any changes made under that Linux session would be lost after a shut-down. While good for a data-recovery system in conjuration with other backup drives , this isn't ideal solution for a temporary work environment.

However, their was a experiment that I wanted to try. An worthwhile experiment which would reap immediate benefits and bare fruit and make these solutions worth exploring. In the next article, I'm exploring OS's that were installed on SD Cards via USB adapter. 

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