2Tb USB3 external drive

mattmos · 2 Sep 2010 at 22:04

Any recommendations?

I'd like to pick one up to act as a nightly backup for my main projects drive.

Ta muchly for any suggestions...

mattmos · 4 Sep 2010 at 15:46

Am I way too early for these drives then? Can't find that many different drives available at the moment. Anyone know what the speed is like compared to esata? Worth waiting a while?

wesley · 4 Sep 2010 at 16:04

usb speed is limited to 30mb/s i think. regardless the size of harde drive

esata got the speed of sata. if you want esata, get esata caddy and use any sata hard drive

mattmos · 4 Sep 2010 at 16:11

That's usb 2 though right? Read some reviews of usb 3 devices reading and writing at over 100mb/s.

wesley · 4 Sep 2010 at 16:16

sorry, i misread

gareth170 · 4 Sep 2010 at 16:57

usb 3 is 5Gbps so it's faster than sata II

Lunatic Dreyfus · 5 Sep 2010 at 16:10

A fast 2TB eSata drive and enclosure would do the job just as well, surely? Though there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in price between an eSata and USB 3 setup oddly enough.

A good SSD might start using some of USB 3.0's performance, but a clunky old mechanical drive won't even get close. So I fail to see the point.

bremen1874 · 6 Sep 2010 at 01:10

A good SSD might start using some of USB 3.0's performance, but a clunky old mechanical drive won't even get close. So I fail to see the point.

The point is that USB 2.0 cripples the performance of almost any drive.

Performance over eSATA or USB 3.0 should be about the same.

mattmos · 6 Sep 2010 at 01:19

bremen1874 said:
Performance over eSATA or USB 3.0 should be about the same.

This is what I'm trying to find out - if using esata the only restriction is the physical drives themselves and not the method of communication with the drive, then I'll just bag one of those. Some numbers on the pc pro website are suggesting that usb 3.0 is faster than esata, but maybe its just the spindle speed of the drives inside the devices?

I guess I'm looking for real world data transfer rates/experiences, not theoretical limits.

bremen1874 · 6 Sep 2010 at 01:40

Both USB 3.0 and eSATA can easily handle any single mechanical drive without slowing it down.

The differences reported between the two interfaces are within normal testing tolerances.

I’ve had the same model of drive connected via SATA and eSATA and the performance was identical (as you’d expect).

USB 3.0 can’t make a drive any faster than it would be on a direct SATA connection. It shouldn't slow it down very much either.

wesley · 6 Sep 2010 at 06:44

but i have seen really rubbish USB3 host controller which only read/write at 50mb/s

i'd go for esata to be honest

mattmos · 6 Sep 2010 at 22:28

Cheers for the feedback everyone, will go and look at some esata drives

mattmos · 10 Sep 2010 at 22:28

Just as an update to this, had a look at some esata drives, but they were actually more expensive than the verbatim usb 3.0 2tb drive I was looking at, and the usb drive is plug and play - no mounting drives when plugging in.

Using windows backup (I'm soo cheap!) I backed up 180Gb data at around 50 Mb/s, and testing out a single 26Gb file on its own the transfer rate was up to 150 Mb/s. So I'm happy with that. The drive itself is suprisingly well built and dead easy to connect, doesn't look the most s****y bit of kit but seems to do the job.