Tuesday, 11 January 2011

Kingston USB 3.0 Flash and SSD Drives

With the advent of USB 3.0 on most motherboards that are either in the market or just coming to market there is really no reason to be purchasing USB 2.0 beyond perhaps the cost to purpose ratio.

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While chatting with one of our long term local suppliers about a pair of DTU30/64GB USB 3.0 drives that were supposed to show up late last week they indicated that they were accidentally sent the 32GB version instead.

We will be picking them up later today anyway and will run a few read and write tests to get a feel for their true USB 3.0 performance.

In our opinion, USB 3.0 puts to rest any alternative connector to USB 3.0’s hot swap capable quick connect ability with ultra high bandwidth. At 5Gbit/S the reality is that most peripherals could not come remotely close to saturating that bus.

Fresh OS Installs

For a small shop like ours, USB 3.0 gives us a reasonable alternative for delivering our fresh OS installs to new hardware versus a network based Windows Image system. Since we consistently deploy four or five different OS versions to new hardware we could have our needed OS images set in folders on the drive for quick access.

Those images would be kept up to date with current drivers as our only product line for servers, workstations, and desktops are Intel based.

The folder structure on the 32GB flash drive would look something like this:

  • Drivers
  • Hyper-V Server 2008 R2
  • SBS2K11
  • Service Packs and Updates
  • Win2K8R2
  • Win7Ent x64
  • Win7Pro x64
  • Win7Ult x64

As needed, we would bump the needed OS to root, change the flash drive’s name, and use it for the OS load. Once completed we would bump the OS files back to its respective folder.

Server Backups

The one benefit we will be seeing in our SMB space when USB 3.0 become ubiquitous will be the improvement in backup speeds. With that increase in write speed comes the ability to run a spot backup or an incremental backup in a fraction of the time it currently takes for a USB 2.0 based destination device.

Thus, we will be able to run a backup just prior to rotating a drive out or run an incremental just before taking a server offline for service and not have to wait as long for the backup to be completed.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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