do portable HDs make laptops less useful?

[gusl]

Dear LJ Genie,

I have recently found out that portable hard drives are a good solution for making backups and transferring large amounts of data between machines.

But can you also boot from a portable HD, from almost any PC, without much effort? If you can carry the essence of your "computer" in such a small package wherever you go, doesn't this make laptops considerably less useful?

-Gustavo

Comments

[inhortte.livejournal.com]

Not if you like working in the park on a sunny day.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

On newer BIOSes, you can also boot off of USB keys, which now come in sizes up to 2GB.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

What I have in mind are normal HDs packaged into a USB-accessible case... So 40-160Gb.

[dusc.livejournal.com]

It will not work "from almost any PC". It will only work if you have a newer BIOS, which supports booting from a USB external HDD. Given that feature, you may encounter scarey driver issues as you move from one hardware configuration to another.

Gotta agree with inhortte & smandal, USB keys are a much better fit for working the the park on a sunny day.

Now, [because I am Tangent Boy]

Almost every single-drive external HDD [HDD enclosure] on the market has either an IDE100 or IDE133 HDD inside. With a few exceptions, you can swap in a generic 300GB HDD.
Expect about 1/3 the throughput of an internal HDD.

I picked up a pocket sized, 2.5" USB enclosure powered off only one (1) USB port. It's rare, and the brand was picked up by Viao. I've not checked if the Viao versions also power off a single USB port. Very nice for easily moving a few GB.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

I don't think that the task of synchronizing various data from different computers, to one hard drive, is trivial. It's actually easier to synchronize to an FTP or WebDAV repository, because the client software can be smart about it. In any case, the ideal centralized storage is NOT an item that I could carry around, damage or lose.

[rainbrot.livejournal.com]

Even without BIOS support for USB boot, you could theoretically use CD-bootable Linux and a USB hard disk. That would require that you carry a CD in addition to the hard drive, but it would probably work. If you're concerned about keeping the CD up to date, you may even be able to use a CD boot loader to boot from the USB drive.