Copying off a USB2 drive locally attached to the same PC as the Drobo: 25MB/sec.

I’m not sure how else to measure the Drobo’s speed, but those seem quite reasonable speeds to me!

On another note, I was curious what speeds you are getting from your Drobo unit, I am thinking about adding a BYOD NAS enclosure to my network to get a few more features & speed than the standalone units provide, the main reason being speed though. The WD Mybook World edition is fine for a repository for all my media files, but copying larger amounts of data to/from it is pure torture to watch.

The ISOs are, as you say, dead easy to generate. It’s the next bit -extracting the right stream, with all the right subtitles (if any) and audio, into a single file that I can then shrink down (I prefer to get them down to 8-12GB) that’s the infuriating bit that usually takes me several goes! (And each go, of course, takes HOURS!!)

I like the idea of using a physical partition as the ‘virtual’ hard drive for a VM… It’s not an option I’ve ever actually used for years (I had a VM in Linux corrupt a physical Windows partition once, many moons ago). But in principle, it’s probably the best of both worlds -and as you say, in that case, Linux as main OS and Windows in a VM, albeit driving a physical installation. May even try that myself shortly!

I can see myself using Linux most of the time, with the occasional need to open a windows program, hence my thought that perhaps I could boot up the physical install of windows 7 from a VM in Ubuntu. I can’t really see where I would need to do the opposite very often, which is boot the physical linux from a VM in windows, but I wouldn’t rule it out either.

Likely most of the time I’ll be using one OS or the other completely on its own, but it would be nice to be able to “jump into” the other from the one I’m booted in to if need be.

I am going to be doing a lot of compiling and editing of the hundreds of home video files I have gathered over the years, so for that purpose I want to be able to use whatever OS I am doing it from (I’m going to try Ubuntu’s Studio edition)with all the resources possible, which is why I want a physical install of each. I am curious to see how far linux video editing capability has advanced since I used it last.

On another note, I tried ripping my first blu-ray with windows 7 using AnyDVD HD and it went without a hitch, albeit eating up 20GB of my drive!, however I ripped it to an ISO image because my ASUS media player will usually treat an ISO image like a full dvd with menu’s etc, but in this case it just plays the video file, so I will be re-ripping or converting it to something smaller to make the transfer to my NAS drive less painful.

I’m thinking I should be able to get an HD video file down to 2GB or so, I have downloaded some HD content that’s around the 2GB size and they are plenty sharp enough on my 50″ 720p plasma, for these old eyes anyway..

Tricky. I was running my Ubuntu in a VMware Workstation VM on Windows 7 in ‘Unity’ mode (basically, the Ubuntu apps just appear as ordinary windows on the Windows desktop: you don’t ’see’ the underlying Ubuntu OS itself), and it looked great and worked wonderfully. I know Parallels and VirtualBox do the same kind of ‘fusion’ mode, but I don’t know how good they are in comparison.

The problem I have with doing this permanently, though, is: what’s the point? I mean, what must-have Linux software (apart from Oracle, obviously!) exists that you’d be happy to lose a thumping great chunk of RAM and CPU from the base Windows OS for? I personally can’t think of anything I use which is really, truly and desperately Linux-only: Handbrake, The Gimp, Sound Juicer, DVD::Rip, Musescore, Stellarium… they all have good Windows equivalents or exact matches, so if Windows was my physical OS, I’d seldom have a *need* to boot into Linux.

Do it the other way round, however, and it makes more sense to me: there are times when I might be in desperate need of genuine Photoshop or Dreamweaver, and then it makes sense to be able to fire up a Windows VM on an Ubuntu host. The loss of RAM and CPU from the Ubuntu OS makes sense if it’s done to run something really important to you.

I guess I’m saying: my physical OS should provide me with all the basics (and some fun while I’m at it), and the VM should provide me with the must-have not-available-otherwise rare exceptions.

To me, that means Linux would be my physical OS and Windows my VM one -especially if all of my ‘basics’ can be installed for free via a simple aptitude command.

Where I get iffy about that, though, is where the *hardware* has problems under Linux. Because if the physical OS can’t support a device, no amount of VMs are going to be able to support it either. My blu-ray drive, for example, will likely have no support *as* a blu-ray device under Ubuntu -so my Windows VMs won’t be able to ’see’ a blu-ray disk either. On the other hand, I’ve had nothing but trouble ripping blu-rays even with Windows as the ‘real’ OS! So in that case, the loss of blu-ray capability by switching to Ubuntu would not, now, be relevant to my decision: I could live without blu-ray if I had to.

But you might have a printer or a scanner or a wifi card or something else which absolutely dictates the choice of physical OS. Short of that, though, I think my ‘Linux for the basics and fun, Windows for the icing’ approach makes sense to me.

However, just to throw a complete spanner in the works: with the sort of hardware specs you’ve just listed, you and I could both quite happily run ESXi Server and run both Ubuntu AND Windows in VMs: no need for a ‘real’ OS at all! Just the slimmest of capable hypervisors. Maybe…

I don’t mind Windows 7 so far, a lot better than Vista, but that’s not saying a lot. I want to have the option to run either W7 or Ubuntu in a VM or from a physical install though, and am not very current with whats hot and whats not in the virtual world. I’m thinking I’ll install Ubuntu and set up dual boot, then maybe run Windows 7 from it’s physical location in a VM from Ubuntu (if possible).

A co-worker runs Ubuntu in a VM from his windows 7 OS and says it works pretty good, but I’m thinking Ubuntu will be my main OS and windows 7 would be a better candidate for being the virtual OS.

You’ve done a fair bit more playing with VM’s than I have, how would you do it?

cheers