Good Friday
Over a year ago I invested in an external USB drive, a Western Digital Passport, to be specific. The drive has proven to be incredibly useful. I guess a lot of people are in agreement. If you go to your local electronics store you will find the Passport and a whole bunch of competitors that weren't there a year ago!
The external drive is a great place to store your backups of important files. If your main system crashes you can get your vital data back. Also, it's useful for temporary storage of large files like movie downloads and iso images of games and OS's.
Similar to USB thumb drives, external drives are formatted in FAT32. This means they are cross platform. You plug them into your Windows, Mac or Linux box and all can see the files! My Linux box is much faster downloading movies. But it's pretty nice to watch them in my screen room on my laptop. No problem!!
Circuit City had a sale on 2 GB thumb drives for $20. Yes, on $/GB comparison that might somewhat contradict my remarks on external drives but what I want to accomplish is "Linux-On-A-Stick", and $20 for a a day's entertainment is affordable. The ultimate goal is to have the laptop running Linux, recognizing the wireless card, and having the ability to run certain Windows apps as legacy applications. Ambitious?? Sure, but I have the time...
The experiment partially succeeded....well that's better than saying that the effort failed!!! I got a USB stick that was bootable but I couldn't get the "persistent" feature to work. In other words, my stick wasn't much different than a live CD. I could run Linux but not update the programs and could not save changes. This is not a dead project. Although I repartioned and formatted the stick I am saving it for another attempt.
I haven't heard much about USB u3 lately. Now, down the road there will be a real USB version 3 technology. u3 was a clever attempt to market some non-free portable applications. Are you lost? Many Windows apps do not have to be officially "installed" to run. Firefox and Open Office are good examples. They can be run from your thumb drive. So what u3 did is to partition the thumb drive with two partitions...one of which had an "auto-run" program that loaded an iso image of a CD with a start menu to execute the software. Clever..yes, new technology.... no. Don't waste your money.
Bottom Line...
Whatever OS your using, an external USB drive will benefit you. Flash drives are convenient but are relatively small when compared to external physical disks and their $/GB cost is higher. I have several thumb drives but the last 2GB drive is probably the last I will ever buy. They will either become incredibly inexpensive or follow other dinosaurs like zip drives to the grave.
The external drive is a great place to store your backups of important files. If your main system crashes you can get your vital data back. Also, it's useful for temporary storage of large files like movie downloads and iso images of games and OS's.
Similar to USB thumb drives, external drives are formatted in FAT32. This means they are cross platform. You plug them into your Windows, Mac or Linux box and all can see the files! My Linux box is much faster downloading movies. But it's pretty nice to watch them in my screen room on my laptop. No problem!!
Circuit City had a sale on 2 GB thumb drives for $20. Yes, on $/GB comparison that might somewhat contradict my remarks on external drives but what I want to accomplish is "Linux-On-A-Stick", and $20 for a a day's entertainment is affordable. The ultimate goal is to have the laptop running Linux, recognizing the wireless card, and having the ability to run certain Windows apps as legacy applications. Ambitious?? Sure, but I have the time...
The experiment partially succeeded....well that's better than saying that the effort failed!!! I got a USB stick that was bootable but I couldn't get the "persistent" feature to work. In other words, my stick wasn't much different than a live CD. I could run Linux but not update the programs and could not save changes. This is not a dead project. Although I repartioned and formatted the stick I am saving it for another attempt.
I haven't heard much about USB u3 lately. Now, down the road there will be a real USB version 3 technology. u3 was a clever attempt to market some non-free portable applications. Are you lost? Many Windows apps do not have to be officially "installed" to run. Firefox and Open Office are good examples. They can be run from your thumb drive. So what u3 did is to partition the thumb drive with two partitions...one of which had an "auto-run" program that loaded an iso image of a CD with a start menu to execute the software. Clever..yes, new technology.... no. Don't waste your money.
Bottom Line...
Whatever OS your using, an external USB drive will benefit you. Flash drives are convenient but are relatively small when compared to external physical disks and their $/GB cost is higher. I have several thumb drives but the last 2GB drive is probably the last I will ever buy. They will either become incredibly inexpensive or follow other dinosaurs like zip drives to the grave.
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