External Hard Drive

T

tjguitarz

New Member
I know people have asked before, but it's been awhile and I'm sure things have changed.

I'm looking for an external hard drive that connects via Firewire or faster, has at least 300gb of space, and is cheap (under $100). I am also looking for reliability -- don't want it farting out after a couple years. Any ideas?

Maybe this one.
 
western digital passport(might not match your price point though)..otherwise western digital or seagate both make external usb 2.0 drives..<G>
 
I don't want a USB hook up because it's kind of slow. I'd like to be able to transfer a few gigs of music and/or a ripped DVD between the two without waiting forever.
 
tjguitarz said:
I don't want a USB hook up because it's kind of slow. I'd like to be able to transfer a few gigs of music and/or a ripped DVD between the two without waiting forever.
Click to expand...

Right now USB and firewire run about the same depending on your cable and connection...my USB from my WD MyBook 500GB runs about 400MB/s, with the firewire it runs about anywhere from 300MB/s to 450MB/s...so I stick with USB, and I transfer bigger things than you...(I transfer things around 30-50GBs :) )
 
Firewire processes the I/O on a dedicated chip and not the CPU, tends to have a faster transfer and lower latency.
 
tjguitarz said:
I don't want a USB hook up because it's kind of slow. I'd like to be able to transfer a few gigs of music and/or a ripped DVD between the two without waiting forever.
Click to expand...
usb 2.0 is 480 megabits a sec(that's 60 megabytes a sec). That's above firewiree 400 and faster than most sata internal drives can muster.
 
Huh... and here I thought Firewire was quicker...

I guess I'll take that off my list of criteria. I think I am leaning toward the hard drive I posted in post #1.
 
I <3 my Western Digital Passport 160GB USB drive.
 
tjguitarz said:
Huh... and here I thought Firewire was quicker...

I guess I'll take that off my list of criteria. I think I am leaning toward the hard drive I posted in post #1.
Click to expand...

looks good..:)

Firewire is faster if you have lots of devices on your usb bus but firewire is harder to find. If you are going to be doing lots of multi-gig files go firwire..you won't have any issues with usb 2.0 though either..:)
 
Tek7 said:
I <3 my Western Digital Passport 160GB USB drive.
Click to expand...
Not to preach, but when I hear my kids say "I love ____." referring to a possession, I tell them, "Love people, not things."

But back on Topic, I have a 150GB Western Digital "My Book" which is USB, and I use less than 25% of the space so far on backups
of files my wife and/or I think worthy of keeping around. It's amazing how many things are deletable when we apply that criteria!
I find the copy speed to be quite amazing (it's connected to my WinXP 3.2GHz P4 computer) when compared to copying off my Win98 333MHz Celeron computer over LAN.

Moral of the story?: USB is faster than CAT5? Or is it just my crusty old Celeron that's slow?
 
you celeron is slow. usb does depend on the speed of your cpu to some degree. Also win98 only supports usb 1.1(as well as the motherboard is going to be limited to usb 1.1 as well) which maxes at 12 megabits..usb 2.0 is 480 megabits.
 
JimL2112 said:
Not to preach, but when I hear my kids say "I love ____." referring to a possession, I tell them, "Love people, not things."
Click to expand...
Thus my use of "<3" rather than the word "love." The "<3" sign isn't meant to be taken as seriously as the word "love."
JimL2112 said:
Moral of the story?: USB is faster than CAT5? Or is it just my crusty old Celeron that's slow?
Click to expand...
Unless all your network devices are gigabit, USB will be faster.

USB might still be faster than gigabit ethernet, but I don't have my math skillz handy for such calculations.
 
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