CHAPTER 10 n HARDWARE CONSIDERATIONS 247
USB/FireWire
Not every company can afford expensive external storage devices. With the advent of
USB 2.0 and FireWire, throughput to an external storage device is no longer extremely
slow: it??™s just slow when compared to a local hard drive. There may be situations in which
using a USB-based hard disk is an acceptable approach.
In Chapter 2, I brought up the concept of portability with respect to backups. By
???portability,??? I mean the ability to easily make use of a backup in the event that original
hardware on which that backup was made is not available. What happens when either
you don??™t have the tape-drive capacity or a tape drive is temporarily damaged? How can
you ensure the data is portable? Well, it certainly isn??™t a fast, sexy technique, but simply
purchasing a number of large, portable USB drives for use as backup devices could work
in a pinch. Would I advocate this as a long-term approach? Never. However, given the
choice of no portability or low-tech USB hard drives, I??™d take the latter.
Avoid early iterations of USB, though.
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