Thirith on 21/3/2018 at 15:59
Since my main PC is a noisy beast and not well suited to recording sessions, I've ordered a mini PC that should be well nigh noiseless. However, it's only got a 32GB SSD, which seems very little, even if it's only used for the operating system.
As the mini PC also has a card reader, I was wondering if it's feasible to use, say, a 128GB SD card as the main partition and run Windows from there. Or would a USB 3.0 drive be a better option? I will mainly need the PC to record podcasts using Audacity, so file access doesn't need to be more than reasonably fast.
voodoo47 on 21/3/2018 at 19:51
not by regular means - you will have to tweak the installer a bit, but it's pretty easy, just google it.
no idea what would be faster, but I'd say both should be good enough to run the os without issues. btw, I'm actually also running a secondary noiseless pc - an atom thin client with a cheap 32gb ssd, it's tiny, completely silent, has no moving parts, cost about $50 total, and is completely adequate for a bit of linuxing.
Thirith on 22/3/2018 at 05:59
Cheers. As far as I can tell, the PC allows booting from SD card and USB devices; when I get it, I'll try to clone C: onto one of them first, but if that doesn't work well I'll just see that I can reinstall W10 on one of the other options.
SubJeff on 22/3/2018 at 23:12
You can get really large portable USB 3 SSDs now. Wouldn't that be better?
Renzatic on 23/3/2018 at 01:47
The one thing I'd most recommend you do is use your internal SSD for the OS, since it's likely to be speedier than any external option you could come up with. Crunch down the OS as much as you can, and use your external solutions for your data.
Thirith on 23/3/2018 at 06:42
Yeah, after some more reading that's also what I'm thinking.
SubJeff: For the things I'll be doing, disk speed won't be extremely important. Otherwise your suggestion would be good, but in this case I don't need to pay the extra bucks.
heywood on 23/3/2018 at 19:00
I have my doubts about installing Windows 10 on a 32 GB SSD. While you shouldn't have a problem doing a clean install, Windows installations continue to increase in size over time, particularly the winsxs folder. I would be worried about running out of space over time and having to start over with a fresh install periodically. If it's a mini PC, it probably has the SSD on a Mini PCI-E card. If so, you could just replace it with a bigger one.
Renzatic on 23/3/2018 at 19:33
Depending on how mini it is, it's either that, an M.2, or an eMMC chip soldered directly to the board.
heywood on 23/3/2018 at 22:01
Most likely an M.2
When I was looking at small form factor motherboards last year, most had an M.2 slot
That's actually the type I was thinking of when I said mini PCI-E.