Working on a flash drive?

crazychicken

Platinum Member
Jan 20, 2001
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I was thinking of getting a portable hard drive (ie. Western Digital Passport) to keep all of my data on so that i can go to work, plug it in, work, go home, plug it in, work more - without skipping a beat and having to worry about syncing anything. I was thinking it would be kind of slow if i was constantly compiling code on a usb harddrive, so I thought a flash usb drive may be faster? Is it faster to work on an internal harddrive than a flash drive?

Also, on newegg i saw 32gb flash drives for 70 bucks from patriot and some other good companies. However, for 90 bucks, it looked like they started to have fancy "shock resistant" casing as stuff. Do those actually make a difference? I will probably back up the drive every day so I'm not really worried about the data, but if I dont get the shock proof one and I travel alot with it, will it really break faster than the shock proof ones?

Any input is appreciated!

Thanks,

Dave
 

myocardia

Diamond Member
Jun 21, 2003
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First of all, if you're planning on doing any work at all from home, you will have to synch once you get back to work. There's no workaround for that. Second, are you aware of just how slow flash drives happen to be? The fastest ones are half as fast at reading data as the slowest USB hard drive, and 1/4 as fast at writing. For what you propose doing, you'll want a USB hard drive.
 

coolVariable

Diamond Member
May 18, 2001
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Originally posted by: myocardia
First of all, if you're planning on doing any work at all from home, you will have to synch once you get back to work. There's no workaround for that. Second, are you aware of just how slow flash drives happen to be? The fastest ones are half as fast at reading data as the slowest USB hard drive, and 1/4 as fast at writing. For what you propose doing, you'll want a USB hard drive.

I assume he is referring to the SSD drives.
They are faster than a HDD reading data but SLOWER writing data.

I would also recommend a USB HDD