Laptop’s Running Apps on USB Flash Drives

I was cleaning out my desk when I came across a box full of 3.5” floppy disks that I used to back up my personal files many years ago and it was a great reminder of how much easier it is to use flash drives and external hard drives to backup and protect our important files. Any of the USB flash drives work for backup but when you use it for porting your files and applications I use my flash drive with Portable Apps on it as a portable desktop, this allows me to move important files and most used applications with me when I need to move from my laptop to other computers that I work with. Besides the obvious capacity of a USB drive the other key feature to check when purchasing a flash drive is how fast it can transfer data to and from your laptop. This is particularly important when you need to run your applications directly on the flash drive. The cheap or free ones that people give away at trade shows do not typically have the higher transfer rates that you want when using it with applications like FireFox.

1. Make sure you get the fastest USB flash drive you can afford. The speeds are on the back of the package or listed in the features part of the web page.

2.Make sure that you download the portable version of the application programs from sites like U3 or PortableApps rather than the original application, these have been optimized to use the least amount of space on your flash drive.

So when you buy your USB flash drive make sure to look for the read and write speeds of the drive - faster is better. If you already have a flash drive and you want to find out how fast it is then you can download HDTune.exe a program from HDTiune.com that will run a performance test on your flash drive. Additionally you can see other peoples' test results for a number of USB drives at PortApps.com.

References

HDTune Program hdtune.com Portapps portableapps.com Portable Apps Discussion on Flash Drives portableapps.com/node/9870 U3 u3.com