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Best / fastest USB powered external hard drive

Comments

  • #2
    marco_polo
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 10,087 Mod ✭✭✭✭marco_polo


    jimbling wrote: »
    Hey guys, just wondering if ye can help me. I'm looking for a new external hard drive.
    I've been looking around online but there are just so many options.

    Requirements:
    USB powered.

    Speed: I use it a fair amount, moving 1-10GB files back and fourth, so write speed is important. My laptop doesn't have eSata, so I'm stuck with USB. Guessing it's hard drive speed that's more important, so 7200rpm is probably a requirement.

    Size: 500GB+. Bigger the better, but it's hard to find a TB one which is USB powered for a reasonable price.

    Cost: Suppose good value is important, but price isn't that big a deal.

    So far, my options are:
    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Transcend-TS500GSJ25M-Trans-500GB-StoreJet2-5in/dp/B001HAMNSY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1263833206&sr=8-1
    The transcend is cheap and supposed to be one of the quicker ones out there.

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Passport-Essential-Portable/dp/B002KQ1Z3I/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1263834457&sr=1-3
    Obviously this has the added space, but the reviews report that it has sluggish write speeds. That puts me off.

    What other decent options are there? Should I consider going for one with an eSata option? I suppose I could also get an eSata pcmcia card for my laptop.

    Any Harddrive will be throttled by USB 2.0 transfer speeds (480 Mbit/s VS 3Gbs for a SATA-II drive), so speed doesn't really come into it at all. Just get a good reliable one.

    If speed is important then eSata is roughly 3-4 times quicker than USB 2.0 (even at that it would still throttle the speed of the HD inside the casing :))


  • #3
    jimbling
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 4,053 ✭✭✭jimbling


    marco_polo wrote: »
    Any Harddrive will be throttled by USB 2.0 transfer speeds (480 Mbit/s VS 3Gbs for a SATA-II drive), so speed doesn't really come into it at all. Just get a good reliable one.

    If speed is important then eSata is roughly 3-4 times quicker than USB 2.0 (even at that it would still throttle the speed of the HD inside the casing :))


    That's definitely not true. I've used loads of different hard drives / usb keys etc and some are much faster/slower than others.
    I'm not sure of the reason, but read somewhere that they don't all utilise the full 480 Mbit/s of USB. I thought this was perhaps due to hard drive speed, but obviously that's not the case. There must be other factors that influence the speed.


    For example, here is a review of the WD mybook external hard drive:
    On CNET Labs' test bench, the 500GB MyBook was very sluggish when writing, via both FireWire 400 and USB 2.0 connections. The drive took almost 36 minutes to write our 10GB test folder, about three times slower than other hard drives with the same specs. On the other hand, in the read test, the MyBook drive took slightly less than 10 minutes to get the job done, which was the fastest among all of the external hard drives we've tested.


  • #4
    TouchingVirus
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 8,584 ✭✭✭TouchingVirus


    jimbling wrote: »
    That's definitely not true. I've used loads of different hard drives / usb keys etc and some are much faster/slower than others.
    I'm not sure of the reason, but read somewhere that they don't all utilise the full 480 Mbit/s of USB. I thought this was perhaps due to hard drive speed, but obviously that's not the case. There must be other factors that influence the speed.


    For example, here is a review of the WD mybook external hard drive:

    Safest bet is an ESATA 7200rpm drive unless you want to splash for an external SSD over eSATA. You will need an eSATA port and a power source (USB for 2.5" drives, proper plug or molex for 3.5").


  • #5
    marco_polo
    Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators Posts: 10,087 Mod ✭✭✭✭marco_polo


    jimbling wrote: »
    That's definitely not true. I've used loads of different hard drives / usb keys etc and some are much faster/slower than others.
    I'm not sure of the reason, but read somewhere that they don't all utilise the full 480 Mbit/s of USB. I thought this was perhaps due to hard drive speed, but obviously that's not the case. There must be other factors that influence the speed.


    For example, here is a review of the WD mybook external hard drive:

    Mmm whileI would have expected some drives to be marginally faster/slower than others (a few percentages in it at the very most, not usually the sort of performance margins to be concerned about generally), However being X3 times slower is some achievement by WD, really crappy drivers or firmware perhaps? :confused:.


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