I have a Dell Inspiron 17r 5737 laptop made in 2013. The cpu is an Intel i5 4200u with 8gb DDR3 ram. It currently has a 1-TB WD spinning hard disk, partitioned with UEFI/GPT, that I am replacing with a 240gb SSD drive. I'm only using about 120gb of the 1-TB. The current drive is dual boot, Windows 10 and some Linux distros. It has about 2/3 of the space allocated to Windows 10 and 1/3 to Linux. The 1-TB will become an external USB 3.0 offline backup drive. I will only be using the single 240gb SSD drive in the laptop. It will be dual boot with Windows 10 and some Linux distros. I will probably allocate 2/3 of the ssd drive for Windows 10 and 1/3 for Linux. I will not be installing the ssd drive with any other drive. What is the best and fastest partitioning format for a single 240gb SSD hard drive? MBR or UEFI/GPT? The laptop is capable of handling either partitioning scheme. I just want to use the one that is the fastest and best. This is not for gaming, just web surfing and general home office use.
depending on your linux if it supports GUID GPT drive EFI booting. other than that id use GUID as MBR can sometimes be infected by malware.
Is it this simple to do it? Let's say this app can do it from within Winblows, as easily as this, just a click or two... Does it affect the existing Linux and Winblows installations somehow? If I then decide to install a new Linux OS, over the old one I already have installed - does it affect the potential new Linux installation in any way, must one do a different installation procedure than with MBR? Or does one proceed the same as before? I am not an IT pro, obviously.... hence the Q's... Thanx!
if youre on EFI boot of win 10 i think easybcd 2.3 can boot linux .. add grub2. but looks like youre on MBR and want to change to GPT ? windows 10 boot may be affected as it wont boot Mater Boot Record (missing in GPT) therefore bios EFI loads a .efi boot file from Boot folder. but then its added to bcd via easybcd add linux grub2 best to lookup info on mint and EFI boot if it doesnt work. (i havent tested gpt and mint) google windows 10 EFi linuxmint 17 multiboot GPT= windows boots from EFI as no MBR in GPT to boot from old style. does your mainboard support EFI or secureboot ?
I use Win7 and have some version of Ubuntu as dual boot. I know how to do this, no problem, from partitioning onwards... I start with W7, delete all the partitions, make one for W7, one for data, leave plenty for Linux and SWAP. Install W7, then Ubuntu, add an alternative GRUB, Bob's yer uncle... What I don't know is the new stuff, UEFI, secureboot, GPT etc. Must learn, will learn! Thanx!
Everyone thanks for all of your tips and suggestions about setting up the SSD drive. It will be a real help when I set it up when it arrives next week. I will report back how it goes. Have a Happy New Year everyone!
The laptop has 8gb of DDR3 ram. I made 8.192gb of swap space. The system is dual boot using grub. No comparison in speed from the 1TB hard disk to this SSD drive.
I just have the swap space set aside in case it's ever needed. I'm usually only surfing with Firefox and the swap is never used because the system is only using 1gb or less of ram anyway and 0gb of swap according to the System Monitor. I have Linux swappiness set to 1 (down from the default 60 setting) anyway, per the suggestion of the link I posted above.
Linux is full of weird names anyway. What marketing genius would name programs grub and gimp? Good thing they are free, they would never sell with those names. Yes those are abbreviations for longer names, but come on!