4 ms·

Well, why not take a cheap case and have a nice, small, portable external.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Yeah, you could do that. But not everyone needs an external (I've got one I haven't powered up in at least two years) and considering externals are rarely backed up (heck often they ARE the backup) I don't know that I'd be jumping to have a played-out system drive as my external.
brazzy 13y ago
Because for the price of the case you can get a flash drive with similar capacity than a 5 year old laptop drive, and much nicer, smaller and more portable?
- idupree 13y ago
  I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway). A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time). Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).
free652 13y ago
That's what I do, also I found that USM cases are great, but I can't find them anywhere? It's just two pieces of plastic.. Grrr.. I have the USB 3.0 and thunderbolt adapters for the USM cases. Manufacturers should really switch to this format.
milsorgen 13y ago
That's what I did with my IDE drives. Just a cheap housing off newegg but the speed is lackluster and having my current computers recognize the device was spotty at best. Probably just the nature of a cheap device but even if it preformed adequately I have trouble deciding what to use it for when I have a plethora of SD cards laying about. Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!

Yeah, you could do that. But not everyone needs an external (I've got one I haven't powered up in at least two years) and considering externals are rarely backed up (heck often they ARE the backup) I don't know that I'd be jumping to have a played-out system drive as my external.

brazzy 13y ago

Because for the price of the case you can get a flash drive with similar capacity than a 5 year old laptop drive, and much nicer, smaller and more portable?

idupree 13y ago
I can get a good USB2 enclosure for $10-15. My 6.5 year old laptop hard drive is 120GB (and couldn't read/write data via SATA much faster than it can via USB2 anyway). A 128GB flash drive costs around 5 times as much as that enclosure. Yes, it's better, but it's quite more expensive. A more comparably priced 32GB flash drive stores several times less data (which might matter to you) and may have write speed that can't even saturate USB2 (ditto; I installed Fedora on a 16GB flash drive that has max 3MB/s write speed and it takes amusingly long to install updates, though its read speed is decent and doesn't suffer seek time). Flash drives will get cheaper, but the meaning of "5 years ago" will change just as quickly (given current trends).

free652 13y ago

That's what I do, also I found that USM cases are great, but I can't find them anywhere? It's just two pieces of plastic.. Grrr.. I have the USB 3.0 and thunderbolt adapters for the USM cases. Manufacturers should really switch to this format.

milsorgen 13y ago

That's what I did with my IDE drives. Just a cheap housing off newegg but the speed is lackluster and having my current computers recognize the device was spotty at best. Probably just the nature of a cheap device but even if it preformed adequately I have trouble deciding what to use it for when I have a plethora of SD cards laying about. Probably scrap it for the magnets at some point. Those are much better than the fridge magnets you find at the store!