Portable Hard Drives: A Profitable Entry Point
The units' broad applicability is due especially to their transportability, large data capacity, swapability, high online speed, relatively low cost and ease of use, especially compared with more traditional forms of storage such as internal hard drives, tape, optical media and drive arrays. External disk drives require little management and are easy to set up, reducing turnaround time. They are cheaper per gigabyte than arrays and tape, while offering significantly higher performance than tape.
Key verticals include construction companies for use in on-site trailers and accounting firms because of the large amount of data that must be moved from client sites. Emergency operations centers are another application as the drives allow for entire back-end systems to be migrated to a center armed with laptops or desktops.
Applications that demand high capacity include statistical analysis of large data sets, financials for Securities and Exchange Commission archiving, plus scientific and medical research verticals. Their capacity is also useful for video editing and animation, and their transportability is good for outsourcing and moving projects between workstations. Other storage-intensive applications such as medical imaging, static graphics and CAD are also common.
Closer to home, consultants and ISVs can use the drives to swap software images during development, allowing multiple revisions to be tested on a system simply by switching drives. The physical drives themselves can be used to establish a revision workflow system by having a drive handed from one developer to the next as each stage of a project is completed. Applications spanning multiple servers can be developed off-site using one or more workstations, then transported to the client site for final testing and rollout. Even a large-system mock-up can be created using laptops and these drives to win a bid. They also allow the client to be part of the development process through ongoing focus groups with a mock-up environment.
System builders can use the drives to swap system images during component and software qualification testing. For troubleshooting, the drives can be used to transfer a system image to another machine to determine whether there's a hardware or software failure afoot.