stonefury208
January 24th, 2012, 05:34 PM
I have an ASUS G73JH and the secondary hard drive on which I had installed an Ubuntu dual boot has begun to fail. Now I am contemplating trying to install Ubuntu 11.10 on an external hard drive and wondering if this is a bad idea.
The drive is 2TB Buffalo HD-LSU2 series. I'm sure this link will be helpful http://buffalo.jp/product/hdd/external/hd-lsu2/
(http://buffalo.jp/product/hdd/external/hd-lsu2/)
I guess my concern is, are these external drives which are designed basically for backup and storage really suitable for running an operating system? I could imagine longevity issues due to overheating and/or the constant reading and writing. If nothing else, I would think it might run slowly since it is limited to USB2.0 data transfer. Finally, since it is a laptop, I think there is a good chance that sooner or later I would bump the cord and abruptly disconnect the hard drive. I don't know what the consequence would be of disconnecting the hard drive from the computer while it's running the operating system, but I can imagine it might corrupt the file system or worse.
Nevertheless, I can find guides like this one (http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/05/23/install-ubuntu-11-04-on-external-hard-disk/) so it seems other people have tried this.
Any advice? And would it be worth trying to clone the installation from the failing drive, since it is still accessible for now? If so, how would I go about that?
The drive is 2TB Buffalo HD-LSU2 series. I'm sure this link will be helpful http://buffalo.jp/product/hdd/external/hd-lsu2/
(http://buffalo.jp/product/hdd/external/hd-lsu2/)
I guess my concern is, are these external drives which are designed basically for backup and storage really suitable for running an operating system? I could imagine longevity issues due to overheating and/or the constant reading and writing. If nothing else, I would think it might run slowly since it is limited to USB2.0 data transfer. Finally, since it is a laptop, I think there is a good chance that sooner or later I would bump the cord and abruptly disconnect the hard drive. I don't know what the consequence would be of disconnecting the hard drive from the computer while it's running the operating system, but I can imagine it might corrupt the file system or worse.
Nevertheless, I can find guides like this one (http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2011/05/23/install-ubuntu-11-04-on-external-hard-disk/) so it seems other people have tried this.
Any advice? And would it be worth trying to clone the installation from the failing drive, since it is still accessible for now? If so, how would I go about that?