Internal or External HDD

[BRP250]

I'm buying a 1TB hard drive to use to store media and backups. My question is which is going to be faster internal or external drives?

I'm at work so I don't have any detailed specs. The motherboard is about 7 months old a Gigabyte with 2 seagate 160mb Raid 0 sata drives. Checking inside the box I can plug a Sata drive cable into the mother board where the internal drives plug in. It has an AMD 9600 phenom chip and Vista +64 and 4gb ram.

If there's not a lot of difference with speed I prefer to go external.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thanks

Bruce

 

[G0AOZ]

Generally speaking, plugging the drive directly into a motherboard interface is going to give the fastest data transfer rates. But what sort of external box/connection were you envisaging? If USB, then most definitely faster directly onto motherboard i/face...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[wahnula]

I really like having my main backup drive connected locally; speedy and safe from bad USB disconnects that can corrupt files. Of course, if you're a REAL safety freak, you can have both, an internal SATA data backup drive and a more-portable USB/FW/eSATA drive for offsite storage and rotation.

Combine this with spooled-off DVDs of important files and you're close to bulletproof.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[pete1427]

Hello,
Here are some numbers to consider regarding HD Interfaces

USB1.1 -----------about 15MPS
PATA--------------About 100MPS/133MPS
FireWire 1394A----about 400MPS
USB2.0------------about 480MPS
FireWire 1394B----about 800MPS
SATA1.5/ESATA1.5--about 1500MPS
SATA3.0/ESATA3.0--about 3000MPS

SATA is internal
ESATA is external


I hope the chart above aids in your choices for your needs.
PCI cards for any of the interfaces are available, I
recommend a SATA 3.0 HD which would be a plug and play
and the fastest because of line looses that occur with
distance from the PC on any of the above interfaces.

Pete/Technician-now retired
Nicknamed "Einstein" by former co-workers

 

[Freestone]

Pete - please clarify your speed nomenclature. I believe you are using MPS to mean megabit per second. And your PATA data rates are actually in megabyte per second, so that would rank it a lot higher than where you placed it.

 

[pete1427]

Freestone*******You are correct Re megabit per second
I believe the chart should read

USB1.1 -----------about 15MPS
FireWire 1394A----about 400MPS
USB2.0------------about 480MPS
FireWire 1394B----about 800MPS
PATA--------------about 1000/1330(Maxtor)MPS
SATA1.5/ESATA1.5--about 1500MPS
SATA3.0/ESATA3.0--about 3000MPS

I have read that the next generation of SATA/ESATA
Hard drives due out soon are going to be even faster,
predicted to run at about 6000MPS. I do not know if
PATA is included in the speed increase too but I would
imagine so.


Pete/Technician-now retired
Nicknamed "Einstein" by former co-workers