setting up/converting windows 11-> ubuntu

[Liam Proven]

On Sun, 6 Jul 2025 at 02:34, bruce <badouglas at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Looking for ideas/opinions. I'm getting a HP amd ryzen 5, with 128G
> ssd, and a 1tb usd extern drive. The goal is to have ubuntu/OS on the
> 128 SSD, and the rest of the data/dev processes/etc on the 1TB extern
> drive.
>
> At the same time, I'm going to be setting up a backup process for the
> SSD/hard drive. The backup process will be every X days.
>
> So, any thoughts/pointers on what the process could/should be?
>
> I'm seeing various sites, with diff opinions, so thought I'd post here
> for input as well.

Slightly struggling to understand here.

1.

> 1tb usd extern drive

USB, not USD as in $, right? Extern = external, obviously. The
abbreviations make this tricky to follow especially when some of them
are wrong!

2.

Why external? It is worse in almost every way: slower, more expensive,
more to go wrong.

You give irrelevant detail in some places but not crucial detail.
Example: you specify an internal SSD (but not the interface) but you
do not specify the type of external drive. Do you mean SSD or HDD?
NVMe or SATA or what? This is important to know but you don't mention
it.

3.

Why just 128GB? That is beyond tiny by 2025 standards. I buy used
128GB drives for about £10 for testbed machines but they are getting
hard to get so small. That is supermarket USB key sized now.

4.

Splitting OS and data is trivial but not if one is removable and so
might not be connected. 1 accidental boot without the external drive
connected and it's destroyed. Don't do this.

5.

You can't have a drive as both part of your system _and_ for backup. I
mean, it's possible but it's pointless. It's both much more fragile
_and_ essentially useless as a backup because if the main drive fails
you lose your backups as well.

6. With SSDs of any type it's a good plan to leave lots empty.  I
explained this in a recent thread.

1TB is small by 2024 standards. I put a secondary data-only drive in
my old iMac in 2023 and it was an 8TB HDD, bought cheap used on
Amazon. 8TB SSD is perfectly doable now and the HDD feels so slow I'm
considering it.

There is a lot of detail in here, some missing, some contradictory,
some just wrong, and overall it's confusing and inconsistent.

Overall advice: don't. UI R DOIN IT WRONG as the kids used to say.

If you have some ultra small form factor machine, budget on:

* minimum 512MB but ideally 1-2TB internal NVMe SSD.
* external, secondary storage, don't waste time on tiddly 1TB drives.
Get a SATA 8 TB or so 3.5 HDD and use that for backups as it's not
performance critical.

You need to think about interfaces more. Research it, learn the
differences, thing about speeds.

Unless you are working on a very low budget then you are thinking in
terms of sizes from a decade ago.  You need to revise your size
estimates up substantially, e.g. by about 10x.

You need to conceptually differentiate fast and slow, form factors not
just capacities.

E.g. SATA SSDs are 2.5" but you don't need 2.5" HDD for bulk storage.
3.5" is cheaper and bigger and more robust.

-- 
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