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November 28th, 2020 23:00
Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows on XPS 15 9500 with multiple hard drives
I have the dell xps 15 9500 with windows currently installed on the 256gb ssd that comes with the laptop.
The laptop has 2 ssd slots. Thus, I want to add a terabyte ssd to the 2nd slot.
I wanted to dual boot with ubuntu. The current storage settings for the hard disk with windows is RAID.
I am a noob to this whole dual boot process and had some questions about how to do it
What would be the recommended configuration for dual booting both OS here?
- Should I add the ubuntu to the 1tb hard drive or partition the 256 and add it to that?
- Either way (adding ubuntu to the 256 or the 1tb), is it possible to have a shared partition between the windows and the ubuntu?
- What should the different drives be configured to: RAID vs AHCI?
- basically what is the best way to set it up so that I have a good experience booting up and sharing content between the two OS?
thanks for the help
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jphughan
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November 29th, 2020 08:00
@mpongmaster I've read that at least some Linux distros these days can work with RAID mode because they have an appropriate kernel driver for the Intel Rapid Storage controller that's active when RAID is enabled, but AHCI would be easier. But if you want to preserve your existing Windows installation, if you change that setting, you'll have to boot into Safe Mode once afterward so that Windows can reconfigure itself, and then you can immediately restart normally and should be fine from then on.
In terms of whether you put the OSes on the same disk and use the secondary for data or allocate one disk to each OS and have a partition on one of them for storage, that's really up to you. I'd give some thought to how much storage you want for each OS vs. shared storage.
In terms of shared storage, the best file system that's natively supported for read/write by both OSes would be exFAT. The only other option without installing additional applications would be FAT32, but that's ancient and doesn't support files larger than 4GB, so I don't recommend it.
mpongmaster
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November 29th, 2020 09:00
@jphughanthanks for the help!
If I am using separate drives for the windows and ubuntu install would I need to change from RAID to AHCI or can I use RAID on one hard drive and AHCI on the other?
jphughan
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November 29th, 2020 09:00
@mpongmaster Happy to help. RAID vs. AHCI is a system-wide change, not a per-device change. RAID mode essentially places your internal storage behind an Intel Rapid Storage controller, which is essentially "RAID lite". This has some uses even beyond traditional RAID, such as allowing Intel Optane and older technologies such as Intel Smart Response and Intel Rapid Start (none of which apply in your setup). And it also allowed Windows 7 to be installed onto NVMe SSDs even though Win7 didn't natively support NVMe, because in RAID mode, the OS only has to talk to the RST controller using an RST driver (which was available for Win7), and the RST controller abstracts the backend storage interface. By comparison, AHCI mode exposes the storage to the OS directly, so it needs to have native support for the interface being used by that storage. And if you want to use alternate driver supplied by your SSD vendor, such as Samsung's NVMe driver, you have to be in AHCI mode because Samsung's driver can't take over for Intel's RST driver, but it can take over for Microsoft's native NVMe driver.