Our need was immediate. It was Wednesday afternoon, and we had to
reinstall a few hundred megs of software on two dozen Windows laptops,
many of which lacked a CD-ROM drive, in time for Thursday morning's
class. We both had other things we'd like to be doing.
After a bit of quick surfing, I found the SimpleTech 10GB USB hard drive
at Circuit City, ready to be picked up. Inside the box, I found it in a
thoughtfully designed case resembling a CD wallet, with pouches taking
up alternate halves of the clamshell: one for the drive, a little taller
than my Handspring Visor, and one for the included cables (USB and a
bizarre-looking keyboard-based power cable). Since the laptops could
supply power through USB, I didn't need to use the keyboard power
cable. I just plugged the USB cable into the translucent grey case with
its IBM Travelstar drive visible within, then attached the other end to
the instructor's laptop.
A green LED lit up, and a few seconds later, the machine recognized
"drive E:" as a local hard drive. We copied the software from CD-ROM to
USB drive, then installed the software on all the other laptops.
Elapsed time: about 90 minutes.
Later, I got to wondering what exotic drivers would be necessary to get
it working on my own desktop machine, which runs SuSE 7.3 Professional.
I couldn't find much information about drivers online, but was
pleasantly surprised to discover why: it's a non-issue, at least for
this version of Linux. The usb-storage module took care of the heavy
lifting. All I had to do was mount /dev/sda5 as a vfat (FAT32)
partition and the drive was wide-open.
I did manage to hang the machine by moving one file from the drive while
simultaneously moving another file onto it -- an experience I didn't
have time to replicate -- but it can't easily be beaten for quick
backups before doing a bit of maintenance work on the boss's computer.
Machines that can boot from a USB device could have your preferred
flavor of Linux installed on them lickety-split; with judicious
reformatting, this could be the social butterfly of your next
installfest.
We paid $150 for the convenience of buying off the shelf within a few
minutes, but a similar sum will deliver a generic 40GB USB drive to your
door within a week, and generic 80GB drives are available for around
$200 delivered.
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