Running my VM’s and using external drivebays – TIP

Hello everyone and cheers from Build in San Francisco!

I always have a backup plan but it’s still always horrifying when your hardware fails just before an important presentation.

I was going to speak at the Pacific ITPros user group meeting on Tuesday and about an hour before starting my presentation I lost all my demo VM’s! I wouldn’t writing this if this wasn’t the third time this has happened for the same reason… I’m super happy about running my VM’s now on my current machine. I have a Samsung 9 Series 15” ultrabook and I’m having still hard time on finding anything better on the market although I’d like to buy a new on already. If you know some other competitor at the same size and weight with the following key specs please let me know:

• i7 processor
• 16GB RAM
• 1GBit ethernet + 3 USB ports
• VGA and HDMI ports

This combined with an external USB3 harddisk bay with an SSD harddisk and (the stolen) Disk Dedup from Server 2012 R2 makes a superbly high performance, light and modular demo machine to carry with you on an airplane.

Everything else works fine but the external disk bay. This one I know had until Tuesday was the third one that has broken. And what’s even more annoying is that it’s always the USB3 connector braking. Luckily I have an extra one that has yet failed or even shown signs of failing. It makes replacing the cable a bit harder but the simple tip I have to give is to always use drive bays that have the same interface model that you computer has!

So never this one again:

But always this one: