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The ILHD will immediately add hundreds of open source operating systems to your collection. Install them one by one, dual boot, run them as virtual machines, run the LiveCDs and LiveDVDs without installing, review them, compare them, redistribute them. Now when someone asks you if you've tried operating system $foo, answer yes!
What do you get?
- 320GB Seagate 7200.10 16MB Cache hard drive with perpendicular recording technology and a 5 year warranty
- 328 ISO image files
- 145 different Linux distros
- 9 different BSDs
- 1 project from each: Darwin, Hurd, OpenSolaris, ReactOS, and Syllable
- 2 architectures: x86 and x86-64
- ISO sizes ranging from a few MB to over 4 GB
- See the full ISO list
What can you do with 314 GB of ISO files?
- Burn them and distribute them to friends
- Run them with your favorite virtualization software such as Xen, KVM, QEMU, VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualPC
- Save hours, days, weeks, or months of download time building your collection
- Put the drive in an external USB enclosure and take it to parties
- Find the perfect OS for your needs by trying all of them
- Try to break the record for the most number of operating systems on a single computer
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Exactly what kind of drives are being used?
A. The drives being used are new OEM Seagate Serial ATA 7200.10 (ST3320620AS) and Parallel ATA 7200.10 (ST3320620A) drives. These drives carry Seagate's legendary 5-year warranty and 16 MB of cache. The only use these drives have seen is copying the ISOs onto them, and verifying the copy afterwards.
Q. How is the drive formatted? What operating systems can read this drive?
A. By default the drive is formatted using the open source EXT3 filesystem. EXT3 is fully supported under Linux and Linux LiveCDs. There are projects allowing EXT3 drives to be read under Windows and OS X at various stages of stability. By request, we can format the drive with almost any filesystem, including NTFS, FAT32*, ReiserFS, and XFS. If you would like a filesystem other than EXT3, please email us your request.
Q. What's wrong with FAT32 formatted drives?
A. FAT32 does not support file sizes of over 4 GB, which would mean dropping several important ISO images, such as the Debian DVD images. If you are interested in a FAT32 formatted drive, please contact us at sales@frozentech.com
Q. Are there really 314 GB of ISOs on the drive?
A. Yes, the same method of storage measurement the drive manufacturers use to measure space (1 MB = 1,000,000 Bytes) is used to measure the size of the ISOs.
Q. Is the drive bootable?
A. No, this is purely a means of distributing ISO files. It may be possible to install and setup a boot manager to boot the Live ISOs directly, but this is not done on the shipped drive.
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