External Drive what a life saver

Well I have wanted to get an external drive to solve one primary problem I have. Desktop and Laptop synchronization.

First Some Background

I am a permanent virtual employee for a company in Scottsdale Arizona. I use the company desktop PC in my home office. I routinely travel to Scottsdale which forces me to take along a laptop. The main problem I have is getting my files off the desktop and onto the laptop for the trip. Then when I return from the trip I like to move the files from the laptop onto the desktop. Well to transfer a large amount of files over ethernet from desktop to laptop and back can be a very slow process while VPNed in. The transfer goes through Scottsdale. I can't even use local IP addresses to route the traffic. Currently I only had one option. Disconnect from VPN and transfer the files. This basically keeps me from working at all while the copy is happening. So I needed another solution.

Enter the solution

Since I had a Comp USA gift card of a sizeable amount I decided to start at my local store looking for an external drive solution. I had an old 5 1/4 30 gig hard drive that I intended to just get an external USB case for. The drive came out of an old computer and I wasn't even sure if it was fully functional. Looking at external cases they where around $40. Seemed like a large amount of changed to drop on just a case. So I started to look for another solution. I stumbled across the Hammer Storage 80 gig USB 2.0 device that was on sale (with rebate) for $69. Most other external drive solutions started at $99 so this seemed in my price range. So I grabbed one of these drives and took it home.

Conclusion

I am very happy with the device. You don't even have to load any drivers for it! It just works! I made some simple batch files to copy the data from my desktop to the external drive. And it worked relatively fast. The best thing is that I can continue to work as it is copying files. Now getting my laptop ready for a trip is no longer a painful process.