Friday, January 03, 2003

USB 2.0 Drives

If you've never used an external USB hard drive, you're missing out on a treat. Especially if your computer has the new USB v2 port(s) which is much, much faster then the original USB v1.1 ports (with USB v2 I can copy 10Gb to the drive in about 90-120 minutes, maybe faster). That's fast enough to be primary data storage, while the old USB v1.1 ports were only fast enough for backup storage (preferably after-hours).

One of the things that I like to do with old 3.5" HDs that I have laying around is to put them in a USB hard drive enclosure (IOGear ION 2.0) and use them at the office for folks to backup their laptop files to (using Second Copy 2000). The USB enclosure only costs about $100 and is an inexpensive way to put those older 10-40Gb HDs to work. Second Copy 2000 is also very easy to configure, if the USB drive is connected then the backup happens, otherwise Second Copy 2000 just sits quiety in the system tray.

The other thing that I've done is put all of my music on one so that I can shift it around from system to system as I need (I own a good number of music CDs and still have a bunch that need to be ripped to MP3). The only time I use CDs is in the car, and even there I have a MP3 player (reads the MP3s off of a CD or plays audio CDs) - so most of the time my CDs stay in a storage box in the closet.

posted by Wuphon's at 10:55 AM