[conspire] (forw) Re: VirtualBox

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Rick Moen (rick at linuxmafia.com):

> After the clarification in the SVLUG meeting, I think it's time to move
> forward.  I do have the tools to repartition the disk.  Currently C: is
> 250M of which only 50 is used.  So I could shrink it down a lot more,
> and even 100 Meg external drive would be more than adequate for the
> "experiment". 

I'm actually a bit startled to see phrases like '250M' in reference to
OS preloads in 2016.  Megabytes, really?  Was that perhaps intended to
be gigabytes?  Am guessing yes.

I'm not trying to be a smartass; sometimes, I really don't know what's
deemed normal in Redmondian OSes these days, because I honestly am many
years out of date on dealing with them.  

Nor do I ever do default installs of Linux, either, so I'm a little
rusty on how big a 'forehead installation' of, say, one of the *buntus
is, but I could swear that it's something like 10GB, right?  Order of
magnitude, at least.

So, on reflection, I'm guessing you mean MS-Windows 9 is taking up 50GB
of a 250GB NTFS partition.  Maybe the 250GB spans 100% of a 250GB hard
drive, or maybe there's also a 'recovery' partition, or a special
hibernation partition at the end of the disk, or something like that.
You might want to boot a Linux live CD and check, to make sure you know
for certain what the partition map is.

> Now a technical question regarding the external drive. 
> Is there a significant difference between "flash" and "SSD"?  Both are
> solid state.  There are "flash drives" in sizes up to at least 1T, and
> SSD as small as 128M.  

I've been a little vague on that, myself, so let's figure it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive is a disambiguation page, that
lists lots of types of drives based on flash memory.

Page supports my hunch that _usually_ the term 'flash drive' is reserved
to refer to 'USB flash drive', aka jump drive, thumb drive, or
thing-you-had-in-your-pocket-yesterday-but-can't-find-dammit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive

Page says that a 1TB USB flash drive is now a thing as of 2013 CES.
Holy mother of God.

Page clarifies that said too-easily-lost widget combines a tiny circuit
board with the NAND flash RAM.  Circuit board houses the controller
logic managing bad-block detection/correction, writing/erasure cycles, 
and other optional logic features.  Speed of the device is invariably
limited by the essential suckiness of USB, which still sucks even in the
current 3.0 spec.  

'SSD', solid-state drive, is clarified at similarly linked page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive .  Technically, 'SSD'
could mean drive made using DRAM or MRAM, but the conventional reference
these days is (likewise) backed with NAND flash RAM.

As with a USB jump drive, there's a circuit board doing the same sorts
of things, and the real difference is that non-toy interfaces get used,
i.e., one of the many somethings less sucky than USB.

There are lots of other details and variations, but that appears to
cover the basics.