I’ve previously described my reasoning for buying a business laptop like the HP 6910p,
http://geekswithblogs.net/twickers/archive/2008/07/08/123643.aspx. I’m now feeling even better about that decision after the latest ‘upgrade’ to my main laptop; adding a second internal hard drive to simplify my use of virtual machines.
The problem
I use virtual machines quite regularly. One major client has a legacy application that requires Visual Studio 2003, which in turn requires Windows XP Professional as an operating system. My daily operating system has been Windows 7 since the beta was released in January. So I created a virtual Windows XP machine with the data (source code, SQL Server 2000 databases) on a separate virtual drive image (in a ‘neutral’ VHD format).
I have run this XP/ VS2003 image in various host software; Virtual PC, VMWare workstation and VirtualBox. Currently it is running within VMWare Workstation 7 (recently released) and to improve the performance of the virtual machine, I placed both the guest operating system virtual drive image and the data virtual drive image on a separate hard drive to the host operating system.
I used a separate drive, in an external USB 2.0/eSata enclosure from Akasa. This accepts a standard 2.5” notebook drive, allowing both power and data to be handled by a single USB to mini USB cable.
Using an external drive has it's advantages. It is very portable and you can easily take the drive with you or move it between different systems. There is, however, one downside. Using it on public transport, even a train, can be a bit awkward; where do you put that hard drive to stop it getting knocked? Even at home I have been known to drop it more than once, fortunately when it was powered down, but still not ideal.
The solution
The advantage of the business laptops, like this HP series, is they usually support removable drives. In the case of HP this is called a MultiBay. This is a simple caddy system for the optical drive, which can quickly be switched for other devices allowing easy upgrading of the optical drive, or placing the optical drive in your docking station and filling the slot with a plastic spacer to shave 150g off the overall weight of the laptop.
I have been using one of these plastic spacers for the last six months or so, so I definitely knew that for me having a DVD/CD drive was an optional extra. I have enough USB flash drives and external hard drives that I no longer use optical discs unless archiving. As long as I have access to an optical drive via the laptop docking station for the odd occasion when I need one, that will do me fine.
One of the available MultiBay items is a simple hard drive caddy, which takes a standard SATA notebook hard drive and places it in a standard MultiBay format. If you buy it from HP it arrives with a drive already in place, for what I can only describe as an extortionate amount of money. Fortunately you can pick one up on empty version on eBay for £20, as long as you are prepared to wait a week of two for delivery from Hong Kong.
Well, I received my MultiBay caddy about 10 days ago, and in less than five minutes I had a new hard drive installed in my laptop. It’s a joy to have an internal drive and no longer have to worry about accidently knocking it while it’s running. In daily use, running my VS2003 development VM, it’s worked beautifully.
No longer are my host and guest operating systems fighting over access to the hard drive, and both the host and guest are smoother in use as a result. It is a shame that the MultiBay standard is USB 2.0, so even though the drive is housed internally I don’t get full SATA transfer speeds. The only other minor niggle is that the drive activity does not cause the ‘optical drive LED’ to flash on the front of the laptop. For this you have to check the red LED on the face of the MultiBay itself, but at least you do get a drive use indicator.
Future upgrade
Of course, this has just left me wanting more. That boot drive is very likely to be replaced by an SSD drive, and with two internal drives available. Two drives means I can install a smaller (read cheaper) SSD drive for booting and running my development tools and applications. The old fashioned MultiBay can handle data storage and virtual machine images. Now all I need are 4Gb SO-DIMMs for a reasonable price so I can upgrade to 8Gb in total ....
The upgrade in images
This is the Akasa caddy I use for most of my external drives (I have four currently), the cost around £15 including the eSata, USB and ‘USB power’ cables, and can take both PATA and SATA drives.
I removed the 320Gb Western Digital drive from the caddy.
I removed the optical drive from the laptop. Note how the MultiBay ‘format’ is effectively based on the standard format for a laptop optical drive with a single extra circuit board on the rear to convert the connector to the ‘HP’ standardised connector.
This is the £20 hard drive caddy which will slot into the laptop in place of the optical drive ...
... and here is that caddy with the hard drive in place, before slotting back into the laptop.