No USB needed, if you install Linux and Grub to the second drive, OSprober will find Windows partition and add it to the Grub Menu List. If Windows is selected, it will boot to the windows partition where Windows can do it’s thing and little chance of Windows Updates borking the Linux EFI.
RThe trick is to make sure that your BIOS boots to the Linux Partion first.
I think this is really the best way to go.
I don’t dual boot (not had windows on bare metal for years) but have seen so many issues over the years regarding single disk dual boot installations that I just get the impression that it’s generally a bad idea.
Separate disk for each OS is one way, or the alternative is to have your Linux / on the faster drive and use the slower one for less “time critical” stuff e.g. mostly what /home is used for, but with more risk of the Windows downgrades affecting your bootloader.
The second drive is a USB drive. (A bottom of the bucket quality SATA enclosure.)
One can never be certain what piece-of-the-proverbial controller gets randomly thrown into the mix with many of these enclosures. I’ve seen cases where boards have been altered to appear to be as advertised upon cursory inspection, but are far from it.
This kind.
(Consecutive IO even, not random.)
Well, I checked it with h2testw and f3 and the capacity is legit
Yeah, I did enable that when I first installed Manjaro like 3 years ago it’s in the first things to do after installing Manjaro
Can I move the /home directory to this SSD (and make it always mounted) and expand the /root folder or I need to do a fresh install ?
There should be no reason to reinstall. Just make sure to change the entry in /etc/fstab to the UUID of the new /home partition.
Nice, then probably your big speed issue is because of the shenanigans internal you did to connect the SATA SSD to the USB port.
Yeah probably, I’ll check that when the new FFC connector arrives and see if it’s for 8 pins and if so, I’ll move it there and see if the speed improves …
I don’t understand what you mean here, could you elaborate please ?
When benchmarking, throughput of storage, both HDDs and SSDs will almost always have far greater numbers when reading or writing large chunks of data. Random I/O (input/output or simply data transfer), is smaller bits of data scattered across the filesystem. So this number will be much smaller.
Random I/O accounts for the majority of most applications’ usage, of course there are countless exceptions (video editing, virtual disks, anything with large files).
The tests you ran used (10 MB chunks, tests for the latter, or consecutive reads and writes. Which are producing numbers slower than this cheap tiny SanDisk flash drive/stick I have.
Moving your home can be rather simple, with the know how and a few commands. It’s what you want to move it to that is making me cringe.
I have a couple m2 enclosures, and SATA ones stored away. Most of them are all metal enclosures that use the case as a heat sink, as these get very hot. This is more important for newer m2 slot MVMe drives, but it’s something that can’t be overlooked with SATA. Does the temperature of this drive come up with sensors?
This Ali Express enclosure probably acts as an insulator. (If you were worried about SSD wear before…) But I actually don’t know what it is. Just that it is a bottleneck for you right now.
Then the single points of failure you are introducing with this sub-par quality device. If it fails, you will not be able to boot normally. (Requiring a manual restore, or rebuilding of your home partition.)
I also heard that running Win+Lin dually is more hazzle-free when you can use them on separate SSDs.
That way Windows updates won’t mess with Grub and you can always boot Linux.
Downside is just switching boot order in Bios for OS change.
Windows doesn’t touch GRUB. However Windows often randomly move the boot entry order to place itself on first boot device, or delete the Manjaro entry in the BIOS. Basically it removes the option to boot other OS and most motherboard will not be able to auto recognize and boot Manjaro, you’ll need to reinstall GRUB and the boot entry. Windows does that wether you have separate disks or not.
It is better to have everything separated though, so Windows and Manjaro bootloaders are not in the same place, but Windows will still break things.
This is easy to handle, there are bios bootmanager menue’s. For example in my Gigabyte Bios, i just press F12 while PC start and choose between my Windows SSD or Linux SSD (hassle-free).
Not in legacy bios mode.
It is not even a consideration here.
An advantage of rEFInd (and one of the reasons I use it) is that it can be moved to the UEFI fallback location $ESP/EFI/BOOT; this is also handy in any particularly troublesome scenario.
This protects rEFInd to an extent, making sure that it remains as the default bootloader.
However, as I have always maintained, the safest route is to have each OS on a separate disk – isolated from the affects of another OS from the onset.