Use an External Drive for Saving Scripts

For a while I’ve been using a second drive in my personal laptop (it supports 2 NVMe drives) to save any scripts, ISOs, Learning resources, etc. It’s handy because if I need to re-image my Windows C: drive I still have all those resources there. Recently my main workstation at work ended up under a pipe that leaked heavily, ruining a lot of equipment. Luckily I tend to upload and commit most of my stuff to Github or the work repo, so no major data was lost, but it took a lot longer to setup my laptop and pull down all the things I’d been working on.

I picked up an [NVMe to USB 10GB/s external adapter](https://www.newegg.com/p/0VN-0003-001R5?Item=9SIA1DSBWX4083&Description=nvme%20to%20usb&cm_re=nvme_to%20usb-_-9SIA1DSBWX4083--Product&cm_sp=SP--1249774--0--2--9SIA1DSBWX4083--nvme%20to%20usb-_-nvme

to

usb-_-21) and dropped a 512GB NVMe drive into it. The access time is fast enough that it feels native to me, and it’s a very small aluminum enclosure with decent heat dissapation. I added some extra thermal pads to help move heat even better. After I got it all put together I attached it to my laptop and formatted the drive to NTFS, and then Bitlocked it. That is something I feel is vital to this process is making sure that you encrypt the drive whether it’s internal or external. You especially need to encrypt it if it’s external.

From here it’s pretty simple. You make sure that you create a folder structure that makes sense for you. I have the following folders in mine: Dev, ISO, Scripts, WIM, WIMWitch. This covers 99% of my daily work, and I’m still comitting things to their repositories, but now if my laptop dies, I can get a few things setup on a new laptop and start working that much faster. I’ve already used it in this fashion to take a test script and directly copy it over to my test laptop. I didn’t have to fiddle with network sharing, no need to commit yet because it’s untested, etc. I highly recommend adding a second drive to your device, and even if it’s a laptop USB-C speeds with an NVMe are so fast I doubt you’ll realize it’s an external drive.