Dave Donaldson

Critical thinking in software development

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External Disk for VPC Images

Sunday, February 25 2007

In my last post about how to isolate VPC images for client work, you might have noticed that my VPC images are located on an external disk. I did this because it's a recommended best practice due to the large disk swapping involved when running VPC images locally on the host hard drive; you get a good performance increase when running VPC images on a hard drive different from where your host OS is running.

But before putting my VPC images on any external hard drive, I had certain requirements:
  • Must run at 7200 RPM. 5400 would probably be OK, but there's a noticeable performance increase when using a 7200 RPM disk.
  • Must be thin. I love my 500GB My Book I have at home, but my backpack is already full of stuff, so lugging around something like the My Book and its cables wasn't going to work.
  • Must be USB-powered. This relates to the point above in that I don't want to have to carry around yet another external power supply.
  • Must be at least 100GB in size. I knew I would be creating many VPC images so lots of space is needed.
Searching around didn't turn up much until Rick mentioned that he uses some spare laptop hard drives lying around for backup purposes; he simply puts them in a hard drive case and carries them around.

I hadn't really thought about using laptop drives for my needs, but this turned out to be exactly what I was looking for because it satisfied all my requirements above (it seems so obvious now). Rick mentioned TigerDirect as a good place to get what I needed and sure enough he was right. This is the hard drive I got and this is the external case I got to house the disk.

The hard drive simply slides into the case and the case provides the USB-power that I wanted. Windows XP recognized it immediately and all I had to do was format the drive and I was off and running. I then moved all my VPC images over to it and was good to go.

Similar Posts

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1 comment(s) so far

Dan Hounshell wrote on January 23, 2008

I have been using a laptop harddrive in a small USB enclosure for about a year now. My 80BG harddrive in my laptop needed to be replaced so I bought a 120GB and decided to use the 80 as an external drive.

I love it - runs completely off USB, it is really small so I can easily fit it in my laptop case, it is super quiet since there are no fans, and the drive cases are really inexpensive. Plus a lot of the drive cases that I have seen come with a nice (p)leather case!

It's like having a high storage thumb drive.

I'd recommend to anyone who has a spare laptop drive laying around to make use of it as an external drive.

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