I’ve increasingly become less and less precious about my OS system disk, now leaving all of my important files on a pair of external drives. Having an essentially disposable system, like anything, has advantages and disadvantages…
The good stuff
* I can jump between different operating systems at the drop of a hat without fear of losing anything important.
* I can jump into an OS testing branch without fear of losing anything important.
* I can be a bit “experimental” and take risks I can’t normally take on what could be considered a “production” or “stable” machine, including the likes of running btrfs / ZoL, etc.
The bad stuff
* Hard disk performance eventually becomes a problem.
* Swapping back to a comfortable environment is difficult without some form of external configuration management.
* Certain other useful things like GPG / SSH keys, .$SHELLrc / .$EDITORrc and friends, VPN configuration, etc. need to be managed externally either by Puppet, et. al. or internal /home drive.
Got any other pros / cons about having a disposable machine? Do you think I’m a genius or a fool? Sound off in the comments!
-C
Wouldn’t it run the hard drives down to the ground if you’re using just a regular Sandisk hard drive? If you were in a perfect world, you’d use things like industrial external hard drives yeah?
Yeah, typically an SSD or enterprise spindle would be ideal, but with spindles being cheap for 1TB and below it’s not really a big deal.
Of course, SSDs have an added advantage of being stupid quick on the install too.