I have an HP laptop running Win 10, AMD Radeon A10-9600p, Ram upgraded to 16GB, 1TB HDD.
I'm thinking about changing over to Zorin (looks to be a good choice).
It has a single 1TB HDD which is partitioned as...
c: main system drive with Win 10 200gb 36% free,
e: 730GB 14% free, this only contains media files
Disk 0 partition 2, 889MB recovery partition
Could I move the HDD to replace the DVD drive using a caddy and then add a small SSD in its place to install Zorin?
Does a HDD in the DVD slot run as well/fast as in the normal HDD slot?
Is this the best thing to do? Would I then install Zorin onto the SSD as a single boot system or should I set it as dual boot?
If Zorin is now on an SSD as single boot, can I then access all my files from the old HDD with Zorin OS?
If you install as single system, you would need to boot to your BIOS, first, then select the drive to boot from.
Dual booting would be faster and easier, as this can be selected from the grub menu at normal boot.
I am not sure I am reading this correctly. Is this a separate HDD than the one you mention above running Windows OS?
If you boot into Zorin OS, you can set up Samba Share in order to share files with a Windows system.
If you need to access another drive that had Zorin OS installed, you can access the connected and mounted drive to access your files - or setup automount on that drive to be able to access them every time you open your file manager and navigate to that location.
Thanks for your help, I need to do a bit more reading up....
If the Hdd in the DVD is slow that could be an issue. I mainly use this computer for downloading video torrents from a private tracker (I am from the UK but don't live there so this is how I get UK TV), using uTorrent (they download to C and then are moved to E), and then I run Plex so I can watch the media on my tv. So needs to be fast enough for this at least, perhaps need to rethink this.
My plan was to remove the existing Win10 HDD, install an SSD in its place and put Zorin on it (with the original win10 HDD removed, to prevent any accidents). If all goes well then install the existing Win10 HDD into the DVD slot.
My idea was using a single boot to the new SSD with Zorin OS, if I came across any problems I would have the option disable/remove the SSD with Zorin and bot from the win10 HDD in the DVD slot (so like it was before the upgrade just in the dvd slot now). I thought doing it this way I might be able to access files on the Win10 HDD in the DVD Slot with Zorin like you could when you connect an External HDD (and any new torrent app could point to my media in E). Maybe not that simple?
Aside from utorrent and Plex I use the pc less now for general browsing as a phone/tablet is more convenient, but I do use it for online banking so I need a secure browser, I mainly use Opera. I also use Lastpass password manager.
I use MS office, but I am ok to use Libre or something else as an alternative.
There are some other programs I use but not very often, Photoshop, Inkscape, Canva, mkvmerge, Handbrake, Dropbox, Drive, Line.
Dual boot is more complicated and it is easier for updates to break something (if a shared bootloader is used). If you have two drives and are not sure whether you want to keep Windows permanently, then I would not set up the operating systems as a dual boot, but each separately on its own drive and with its own bootloader. You can access your Windows disk from Zorin, but it is not recommended to share it and save files on it from both Windows and Zorin.
Simply calling up and playing the saved movies (which are on your windows drive) should not be a problem.
I think your idea is good. Remove the Windows disk, install Zorin on a new ssd, put the old hard disk with Windows in the caddy. If you want to boot Windows when something is going wrong with Zorin, you can set Windows on first position in your BIOS to start it.
Depending on what you want to warch, try Zorin in live mode, then install Hypnotix which covers most TV channels world wide, including UK ones and you can record live content. I was recording a CNN broadcast of a Bernie Saunders speech but lost it when Endeavour OS wrongly installed to my PCLOS Debian drive instead of the borked KDE neonuser drive I told it to install to.
I agree with both @Aravisian and @Forpli, however I agree more with Forpli, as in my experience I've suffered from dual-boot issues, as even I had thought it would be convenient, but it wasn't.
Turns out, there were a few issues (some of them because of booting from a HDD). First was a time sync issue. My Linux OS fetched time from the BIOS and worked well till shutdown (and if I reboot into the same again)
However, when I booted into Windows 10, it fetched the time which was stored before I booted into Linux. It can be that Windows might store the time differently within the BIOS and then change it once the user boots into it (I checked the time within the BIOS and it was synced with the time on Windows, not Linux)
Sometimes, the Windows GRUB entry disappears after 9-10 times of switching at times, sometimes it can be the Linux entry too. In conclusion, even I'd recommend for booting seperately using the BIOS bootloader, not from the GRUB (Linux's Bootloader)
I think using a single boot system makes the most sense to me, I'm only really keeping windows as a just in case, if everything goes well then I think I will eventually remove it completely.
My concerns are,
Will the old Win10 HDD work well enough in the old DVD slot, especially with Plex and uTorrent.
Is utorrent available for Zorin, I havent seen it, if not what would be a good alternative? Is there an easy way to configure it to share my existing media on e drive (the hdd now in the dvd slot) without having to manually load each torrent again and set the download location for each one, I have over a thousand. A way to export from utorrent to a new client.
I have a suggestion @alphason, can you get an external HDD reader? The one you can connect via a USB port? I'm sure it would have better speed than the disk drive caddy. It may/may not have the same speed as the internal SATA port, but it's better than DVD caddy.
Plus, I'm sure that would also show up on Zorin similar to a pen drive, so file transfers should also be convenient!
This is just a suggestion, @Aravisian you can verify this
The USB bottleneck would make a steeper curve, I think. Even a new USB 3+ port would max out at around 40 megs per second but a lower end SATA II DVD connector can get around 250 megs per second.
But the link you shared earlier had the another person claiming that he got 1/5th of the speed he used to get in an internal SATA slot, by using the caddy. So I thought using USB could suffice.
I agree, but would it be worth a try? As fiddling with the laptop internals can be a bit troublesome for some users, and there can be chances of minor damages, like removing the cables while the system isn't shut down (it happened with me and I had burnt the terminals )
However, @Aravisian would you recommend the OP to try both internal and external caddies from a local technician? It might give us some insight of the laptop's capabilities.
I've found more cases reporting slow speed from a HDD in the DVD caddy, maybe I need to rethink think this, and also read many laptops will not boot from the HDD in the caddy, they are expecting an optical disk. This is less important but makes it awkward if I want to use windows from this drive.
The only thing I note is that I also have an external USB HDD, when I plug this in the speed is enough for Plex streaming to my tv, and also sharing with Utorrent.
I'm not even sure if Plex works with Zorin yet, and need to consider how I will transfer my torrents files in utorrent over to a new client.
Perhaps I need to forget the caddy and install a new bigger SSD, which I was trying to avoid.
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