External Harddrives (USB)

[skiflyer]

I need to pick up a couple of USB2 external hard drives for backup purposes. I really don't care about physical dimensions (within reason), I figure 20+ gigs will cover my needs for a couple years at least, but wouldn't mind getting something big enough to do more.

Reliability and price are much more important to me.

Was wondering if anyone had some recommendations, or just as important warnings of drives to absolutely stay away from.

Thanks,
Rob

 

[micker377]

I just picked up an enclosure and put in a spare drive. That way you can upgrade to a larger drive in the future. You can get them for USB or Firewire or both (for portability between computers.

 

[NWgeek]

Installed an "old" hard disk in a USB 2.0 enclosure. Very simple to do. You do need to remember to set the jumper pin on the hard disk to be "master" or "MA"

My only complaint with external USB devices, in general, is the use of those little square Type "B" connectors. Very hard to tell which end is "up" in low light. I gave up and just put a red dot on the cable connector so I could tell so which way to insert the silly thing.

 

[garebo]

Any firewire or usb enclosure will do fine at the 20 gig level you are talking about. Once you get over, say, 80 gigs, some enclosures cant handle it, some can, newer usb 2.0 enclosures can usually handle larger drives.
I believe the best usb enclosures have whats called the "oxford" chipset in them.
Firewire is great too. Firewire and usb2.0 are about the same speed, usb1 is slower, although the difference between the 2 is not as great as the numbers suggest at all, imho. I think there is more too it than that.

 

[Harlequin007]

Personally I use a 60GB external on USB 2.

No additional power source and it only uses 2 USB cables.

Downside: speed...!


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Cogito Ergo Sum
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[MrHelpMe]

Hi Harlequin007,

Could you provide a benchmark of how slow an external hardrive is. Really concerned about this as I am thinking about getting one.
Also, how about if I by an external harddrive, can I use the enclosure if I wish to upgrade at a later point in time to a bigger harddrive. I ask this because I do not have a spare harddrive and was thinking would it be cheaper to buy the whole unit or by the casing and then a harddrive and add the harddrive to the casing. Thanks so much again.

 

[rwfhere]

I have an ez-bus-dt from capricon.com,comes with the backup utility disc, try them.

 

[cdogg]

SalvatoreF,
There are many threads that have talked about this in the past, particularly in the Hard Drive forum. Basically it comes down to this...

USB 2.0 maxes out at 60MB/s (or 480mbps). That's just over half of the ATA/100 interface. With that said, hard drives rarely average more than 45MB/s transfer rates, so that's still within the limit of USB 2.0.

However, what sparks the average transfer rate is peak transfer times. Peaks often hit anywhere from 70-85MB/s on a good drive. That's well over the ceiling bandwidth that USB 2.0 provides. Because of this, USB 2.0 drives in most situations will be roughly 20-25% slower or more (lucky to average much more than 30MB/s).

~cdogg
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