My notebook is just a hard drive!

My friend, in order to save money, is considering building an 2.5" external hard drive instead of buying a notebook for college. I guess he plans to store his data on the hard drive and then access it by plugging it into random computers around campus.

My question is whether or not this is feasible? Would it be better to use just a 1 Gb flash drive? He would probably just be using Word files, etc.

I have no experience with external hard drives so I'm not sure exactly how they interact with the computers, but since I imagine that campus computers are on pretty tight security, they might not even let the hard drive do anything. Also, how long does it take to set up a computer to see and use an external hard drive. If it's over say 5 min, then it would be very cumbersome to use this method.

I think it's a silly idea, but I would like some more informed opinions.

Any thoughts?

Cyrus

 

I knew some people who did that with 1GB flash drives and allowed them to log on to computers and use them as you said. But sometimes on college computers, it wont even let you go on to your drive.
(what computer lab ID's are for then ???)

 

If its going to be just Word documents, a 1 gig flash drive would be more than enough I'd think...all of my papers I've ever written dont total more than like 100 mb, but then again, I'm not a huge writer For general college use as well, I don't think it would eclipse 1 gig too soon. The external hard drive idea (I'm not too knowledgeable about those) does seem like a big hassle, but would indeed save a lot of money if it works

 

Don't most colleges/Universities have an online system whereby you can store your files/folders etc.? That would make more sense if you don't have a laptop and can access all your stuff at any computer, making each computer just a terminal.

 

There are also plenty of online storage places too, so if your college doesnt have one then maybe this is another way, at least you wont have issues with access. If you/they do go the hdd route, make sure its a 2.5" hhd or smaller, ie one that doesnt require external power, this makes it very impractical to carry and use as often there isnt a spare power outlet. Has your friend considered geting an ipod? at least this way the hdd would have another usefull use.
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It is indeed my friend who wants to do this, as I have an Asus V6J. But I still would find an external hard drive useful for backups.

I have seen colleges where you can store your info on their servers, but it's ridiculously expensive- something like $0.30 a megabyte... I just remember that it would be Way Cheaper to buy your own hard drive.

 

What cheapass college charges for storage for students? wtf?
I'd hate to be a CS student at that school trying to write programs for the mainframes, having to pay to do your homework.
Even the local community college here gives you a common folder to store things in. Some guys in a class i took had gigabytes of files in there. We even installed Unreal Tournament (old school) on our roaming profiles and played lan games in the labs.
Hard drive space is cheap, especially in bulk. If this college is so hard off they have to charge students to store files, i'd be looking at a different school.

 

why would you build a external hdd? typo?
its kinda of a hassel to bring an external harddrive
what i usually do is use gmail or some server hosting company and upload my files onto there, and when i get back to the dorm or w/e i dl my files from there onto my harddrive.

 

maybe they meant assemble one from a hard drive and an enclosure, instead of buying a pre-built external drive.

Some schools do limit the access of external devices to the workstations, so contact the school to find if that will work. Also, some schools have removed workstations due to the increasing number of laptops. I personally would hate to depend on school workstations to do all my computing.

And my school gave each student a reasonable amount of server space, beyond that you had to pay for additional storage.

Also, Professional has 1 F and 2 S

 

Don't let the number of computer labs on campus fool you - there are never enough computer on campus for the students. My campus had 2 main computer labs, and 2-3 computer labs for architecture students, and when it gets down to finals or break times, a free computer is very hard to find. I've had to wait for an hour or more before just to print off a paper before class.

 

If you want to see a school with plenty of computers come to mine. There are about a dozon labs with 30+ workstations each, then the 2 commons areas+ the library adds around another 100 or so public computers, im not kidding. And there are only around 4000 people who attend my school, most of whom have their own laptop.