Big Advantages From Small-Footprint USB 2.0 Drives

Those neat little USB flash drives that some people wear around their necks or clipped onto their shirt pockets are a lot more than a mere fashion statement. These drives--and their slightly larger hard-drive-based cousins--can help system builders implement a variety of workstation, laptop and server systems.

Small-footprint USB 2.0 flash and hard-disk drives can be used in a number of applications from making the many kinds of backups you and your customers need every day to constantly reminding customers of you and your business. Their small size and relatively high speeds suit them well to tasks formerly entrusted to slower, more costly, more cumbersome and sometimes less reliable media such as tape, diskettes and Zip disks. System builders can use flash drives for building simple backup systems, capturing data at a client's site, installing software anywhere, and more.

USB flash drives come in a variety of sizes, ranging from 32 MB to 8 GB. Larger flash drives are still quite expensive. That's where disk-based USB drives come in. A 2.6-inch x 0.79-inch x 0.46-inch 4-GB Sandisk Cruzer Mini drive sells for over $300. But a 3.75-inch x 1.875-inch x .5-inch 4-GB hard-disk-based I/O Magic Gigabank drive, pictured below, costs only slightly more than half that, or about $180.

USB 2.0 can handle throughput rates of up to 30 MB per second. As with all disk drives, reading from small-footprint USB drives is faster than writing to them. Currently, flash memory drives are capable of average write speeds ranging from 10 MB to 25 MB per second and read speeds of between 11 MB and nearly 28 MB per second. Tiny USB hard drives are much slower, with write speeds in the range of 3 MB per second and read speeds of about 6 MB per second. For specifics, always check with the manufacturer of drives you're thinking of buying.

Putting Small Footprint USB Drives to Work

There are at least five ways system builders can use small-footprint USB drives:

• Making backups

• Installing software

• Setting up new disk drives

• Transferring data to other flash drives without a computer

• Promoting your business

Let's look at each of these options in more detail.

Making Backups

Many clients fear the loss of data, whether on personal computers or mission-critical servers. While easy-to-use data backup software is readily available, where do you put their backups? And how can you assure backups are taken off-site?

Tape is still the backup option of choice for SMB and enterprise backups, though disk is quickly becoming a favorite in many IT shops. Older removable media drives, such as 1.44 MB diskettes and Iomega's Zip drives, are still used by some. But for quick and reliable backups you can carry in your pocket when you go off-site, you can't beat hot-pluggable, small-footprint USB 2.0 drives.

Tape backup devices are relatively expensive and, except for the more costly, slow. Larger USB external units are too large to easily take off-site. Zip disks are fine, but the disks are relatively large, possibly discouraging users from taking them off-site. And I'm sure you have had awful experiences trying to read a 1.44 MB diskette made on one drive on another drive.

Sometimes backups to small-footprint USB 2.0 drives can best be made by simply dragging and dropping files from local drives to the small footprint drive. You also can write simple batch files to copy files or even issue copy commands at the Command Prompt. But the best and easiest way to assure accurate file backups is with the use of a backup application that lets you make on-demand and scheduled backups--or even continuous, event-driven backups that occur whenever a file changes.

Many excellent backup applications are available, including full-blown backup programs from vendors such as Veritas, EMC-Dantz, and Symantec. There is also a range of less complex products that do an excellent job of on-demand, scheduled and event-driven backups, including Gelsoft's SynchroMagic and Tobias Giesen's Super Flexible File Synchronizer. In the screen shot below, I'm using Super Flexible File Synchronizer to back up to a flash drive (Q:).

Fortunately, many small-footprint drives come with good backup software. For example, SanDisk provides software with its Cruzer USB flash drives to easily backup files and Outlook folders. In the screen capture below, I'm about to back up the standard Outlook folders to the Cruzer using SanDisk's CruzerSync software.

And in this next screen capture, I'm using CyberLink's PowerBackup software, (which comes included with i/oMagic's 2.2 GB and 4 GB small-footprint USB GigaBank hard-disk drives) to select a folder on my C: drive for backup to a 4 GB GigaBank drive:

As you can see, software from small-footprint device vendors makes end-user backup easy. If it's easy for end users, then system builders will like it, too. Especially for on-site backups, often under pressure and the watchful eyes of clients.

While we're on the subject of backups, think small-footprint USB 2.0 drives when you need to copy anything and take it back to the office for analysis. Use these handy drives to reliably transport anything from log files to databases.

But here are two cautions you should observe with small footprint USB 2.0 drives for backups.

• Make sure the small-footprint drive you choose has enough disk capacity to hold the backups you'll need. This is especially important when working with end users. Nothing can be more frustrating for them than having a backup fail with some technical explanation or, worse, with no explanation at all.

• If data is important, don't rely solely on small-footprint drives for backup. Instead, back up the data somewhere else, and follow regular off-site rotation schedules. Think of backups to small-footprint USB 2.0 drives as ways for end users to easily capture, restore and move their own personal data. For the system builder, these drives are best for capturing on-site changes made in databases or other files that you'll need to analyze off-site.