External USB2.0 Hard Drives
Community Forums/General Help/External USB2.0 Hard Drives
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| Hi, looking to get one for backup purposes. Can anyone recommend one? And what kind of write speeds can I expect? It's for my laptop which also has an eSATA connection, but not as much choice going down this route. Thanks Jim |
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| Make sure to get one with it's own power supply as some USB ports do not carry enough power to run external hard drives reliably. The drive can disconnect half way through file transfers and that's going to cause all manner of trouble. |
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| I'd imagine they're all much of a muchness since the limiting factor is the USB bus speed. My one connects to 2 USB sockets to get around the possible lack of power Gfk mentions. |
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| As far as write speeds are concerned: USB 2.0 is 480MBps, shared across all USB devices connected to the same controller, minus the protocol overhead. In real-world performance that translates to about 35-40MB/sec maximum if you don't have much else going on. (If you have two USB drives connected at the same time and are copying from one to the other, you may see ~20MB/sec) eSATA will be significantly faster, it is 3GB/sec max, which means that a typical harddrive won't saturate the bus and you can get the native drive speed, which is typically a little over 100MB/sec on modern drives. For the best of both worlds: many of the external enclosures support both eSata *and* USB at the same time, allowing you to connect it over either. Personally I'd look for a USB3.0 / eSata combination enclosure, so you are future-proofing the drive for USB3 capable computers as well. (It's backwards compatible with USB2, meaning it would still work with your current PC too) |
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| I recommend the seagate portable 500Gig external harddrive for any purpose at all. :) http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=f54a4d13af3df110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&vgnextchannel=f424072516d8c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD&locale=en-US&reqPage=Support it is very affordable and has a very fast transfer rate. I use one for all of my files. :) Last edited 2011 |
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| If possible go for an e-sata drive, their much faster than USB 2.0 drives. I use one for my games files as my internal drive is an SSD. You can buy external Sata drive enclosures and then just buy the drive to put in it. Might want to leave it a while though as drive prices are still very inflated. |
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| If you're looking for a cheap(ish) drive, currently your bet bet is to check the brick and mortar generic department stores, they may still have some old stock that doesn't have their prices tripled yet (unlike most online stores) at the moment) |
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| Why have HDD prices gone up? I wasn't aware of this. |
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| Aliens! |
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| Why have HDD prices gone up? I wasn't aware of this. because there was a flood in thailand or taiwan or somewhere that makes hard drives (seriously).Last edited 2011 |
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| Flooding in Thailanmd put several of the manufacturing facilities that make HDD platters 15 feet under water... And unfortunately there is very little spare capacity in that market segment (with just a couple of manufacturers on the planet) so it immediately radiates across the industry. Seagate states it would probably take them about 9 months to get back to 'normal' manufacturing capacity, so expect prices to be high most of next year as well. (On the bright side, higher HDD prices will likely lead to lower SSD prices, thanks to more demand and extra competition in that field) |
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