Okay, thumbdrives are ubiquitous. Roomy, convenient, and with the growth in portable applications can be a really useful way to carry a familiar working environment around with you.
But they're not quick, are they? Even the fast ones aren't as quick as you want them to be.
Introducing my new toy: a 2.5 inch drive enclosure and a 40Gb hard disk from a dead laptop. Total cost: about six quid. Five times as much storage as my thumbdrive and far, far faster. So I copy everything off the thumbdrive and treat the new gadget just like my old thumbdrive.
One small concern: will I hit more problems with the NTFS format than I did with FAT32? Maybe I should have made two partitions. Maybe I'll do that before I go too much further... also, it needs two usb ports to give it enough power, but I think I can cope with that in most situations.
First impressions, though: marvellous. We'll see if I still feel the same way when it comes to carrying it in a pocket.
[Later] okay, I'm a coward. But I've repartitioned the drive (using the always excellent Paragon Partition Manager to do all the work) into a 27Gb chunk, converted to FAT32, and used the 10Gb remaining as an encrypted partition, created with TrueCrypt to replace the half gig Truecrypt volume I previously kept all the things I wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands. I'll probably never get close to filling it, but it's a sensible use for the space and, that way, I don't lose another drive letter.
But they're not quick, are they? Even the fast ones aren't as quick as you want them to be.
Introducing my new toy: a 2.5 inch drive enclosure and a 40Gb hard disk from a dead laptop. Total cost: about six quid. Five times as much storage as my thumbdrive and far, far faster. So I copy everything off the thumbdrive and treat the new gadget just like my old thumbdrive.
One small concern: will I hit more problems with the NTFS format than I did with FAT32? Maybe I should have made two partitions. Maybe I'll do that before I go too much further... also, it needs two usb ports to give it enough power, but I think I can cope with that in most situations.
First impressions, though: marvellous. We'll see if I still feel the same way when it comes to carrying it in a pocket.
[Later] okay, I'm a coward. But I've repartitioned the drive (using the always excellent Paragon Partition Manager to do all the work) into a 27Gb chunk, converted to FAT32, and used the 10Gb remaining as an encrypted partition, created with TrueCrypt to replace the half gig Truecrypt volume I previously kept all the things I wouldn't want falling into the wrong hands. I'll probably never get close to filling it, but it's a sensible use for the space and, that way, I don't lose another drive letter.
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