Moved my whole repair bench to a portable SSD setup, no more 90 minute image loads

For like 5 years I kept a stack of spinning drives on my bench for cloning and imaging. Every restore meant grabbing a drive, finding the right dock, and staring at a progress bar for an hour and a half. Last month I grabbed a 2TB portable NVMe drive with a USB-C enclosure for $130. Swapped my clone workflow over to that and now a full Windows image takes about 12 minutes. Big difference when a customer is waiting in the shop. I also stopped pulling the target drive out of their laptop, I just boot from a USB installer and image over the network. Honestly should've done this back in 2022 when I first read about it on here. Anyone else running a bench off a single fast external drive, or are you still managing file cabinets full of old HDDs?

1 comments

1 Comment

coleman.seth18d ago

Funny how we cling to old ways just because they're familiar, till one change makes everything else feel ancient.