What is the "better / best " method to multi-boot different OSes natively WITHOUT VirtualBox(es) ?

[RW]

On Sun, 25 Oct 2020 17:33:21 +0100
Polytropon wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Oct 2020 06:50:25 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> > I also want to add for consideration, if reboots between operating
> > systems are often wanted and HDDs are used, it's way better when all
> > drives, even the unused drives are spinning all the time. Parking
> > and releasing heads very often, does shorten the life span the
> > most.  

I think this is mostly a myth.

Manufactures specify a figure for this of, IIRC, around 150k cycles.
Drives that are switched-off a few time a day never reach anything like
that.

A few year ago Western Digital made some green drives, with extremely
aggressive power saving, that parked within seconds. With some usage
patters these could fail in months. I think it was around this time
that people started talking about heads as if they were like sledge
hammers.


> I don't know if this is still true, but in ye olden times,
> there was a distinction between "home PC disks" and "server
> disks"...
>
> dislikes ... running all the time

And they aren't designed to take the same levels of reads and writes.

 
> Probably modern disks tend to be more like server disks,
> even when being sold for and used in home PCs... :-)


These days home drives at 2TB or bigger are usually shingled - often
without any mention, even on the data sheets. Typically there's a more
expensive version aimed for use in RAID that isn't shingled.

Another difference is that home drives try very much harder to recover
data, whereas a drive intended for RAID is programmed to fail quickly
and leave it to the redundancy.