As consultants we get issued with pretty impressive laptops that strike the best possible balance between desktop replacement behemoths and portable machines with reasonable battery etc. The point being that as we move between a variety of projects in a variety of client sites the only constant is the laptop to deliver work on. It is impractical to have a proper workstation and ludicrously expensive and compromised to try and get a laptop to genuinely replace a workstation.
My current Dell has a single 7200 rpm 100GB laptop drive. In laptop land, this is great. But with 2GB of RAM (and the promise of 4GB) and a dual core processor I can run up several Virtual Machines and find myself with two problems:
- Insufficient hard disk space for the increasing number of virtual machines.
- Insufficient IO performance because dual core means two real parallel tasks dependent on one disk, and with IO orders of magnitude slower already...
The typical solution is to opt for an external hard drive, balancing the competing demands of convenience and performance as always:
- Host powered and tiny: slips into the laptop bag with no extra weight, power supplies and cabling. However they typically lack serious performance and capacity.
- Powered: typically USB 2 or FireWire and have fast and large drives. However, they are large and heavy and entail another power supply to carry and cabling.
- Laptop integrated: whip out the DVD drive and pop in another HDD right into the laptop. This second spindle is straight into the motherboard controller and needs no cabling. Typically not so large in capacity but seriously convenient and offers one more spindle.
I was thinking that the laptop second hard drive was probably the best solution, but I was pointed at this hard drive from Lacie. So this offers:
- eSATA (as long as you get a good eSATA PC card for the laptop) which by all accounts will out perform FireWire et al.
- It offers 500GB of capacity - plenty for me.
- It raids two drives in a stripe which means some pretty useful IO performance.
- Still portable (didn't suddenly become a monster NAS in my laptop bag!) albeit another power supply and cable.
- Reasonable price point.
Can anyone trump this?