Increasing It Laboratory Flexibility Using Portable Hard Drives

IT students have unique workstation requirements that include complete control of a computer and its configuration, resulting in setups that are often incompatible with other uses of the lab. For example, the system integration and administration thrusts of the IT curricula require that a student be trained week after week on his own system, with his own software installation, configuration and log files. However, few institutions can afford space and hardware to provide students with individual systems. Possible solutions include requiring students to own laptops, creating individual virtual servers on a powerful hardware system, or more recently, to use portable hard drives. The use of small, portable hard drives for dedicated system instruction was tested this year in a Web-systems course. Students in a study group were provided with portable drives and a second (control) group had notebook computers with large drives, a partition of which was dedicated to the IT coursework. The students compared these options in terms of speed, reliability, ease of use, and in the case of the drives, portability between host computers. Other comparisons such as weight and cost are readily apparent, but were evaluated according to their importance to the students. The study found that portable hard drives are an effective compromise between cost, flexible lab use, and performance.