Hi,
I am looking for a backup external drive, primarly for my laptop but also for my future desktop, the drive will be used only to backup data/files, I have decided to opt for the Western Digital WD10EADS, as it offers the right balance of performance and power consumption.
For the enclosure I am looking for one that has USB2/eSATA, has decent build quality, is fairly compact, keeps the drive cool and is a subtle design. The Icy Box seemed 'perfect', and a bonus is that you can buy it with a 5.25 caddy, which means you can simply slot it in/out of your desktop.
http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/products/...e_objectID=5150
Howeverr, having looked at the review (below), there are a couple of things I am not sure about ;
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardw...e-review-8.html
1. The overall performance seems good, but the burst speed doesn't - I am guessing the burst speed comes into play only for those files in cache (32mb) ? In a real world environment, will I notice a significant difference ? My files are a mixture of large ISOs, and relatively smaller MP3/JPEG/TIFFs. (I will probably use the drive in conjunction with a PC Cardbuus ESATA card for my laptop)
2. The enclosure does not support S.M.A.R.T, - Apart from mointoring Tempertures, what else would I miss out on ? Or is SMART not relevant if I am going to use this as a purely backup HDD.
Any advice appreciated. Thanks
I am looking for a backup external drive, primarly for my laptop but also for my future desktop, the drive will be used only to backup data/files, I have decided to opt for the Western Digital WD10EADS, as it offers the right balance of performance and power consumption.
For the enclosure I am looking for one that has USB2/eSATA, has decent build quality, is fairly compact, keeps the drive cool and is a subtle design. The Icy Box seemed 'perfect', and a bonus is that you can buy it with a 5.25 caddy, which means you can simply slot it in/out of your desktop.
http://www.raidsonic.de/en/pages/products/...e_objectID=5150
Howeverr, having looked at the review (below), there are a couple of things I am not sure about ;
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardw...e-review-8.html
1. The overall performance seems good, but the burst speed doesn't - I am guessing the burst speed comes into play only for those files in cache (32mb) ? In a real world environment, will I notice a significant difference ? My files are a mixture of large ISOs, and relatively smaller MP3/JPEG/TIFFs. (I will probably use the drive in conjunction with a PC Cardbuus ESATA card for my laptop)
2. The enclosure does not support S.M.A.R.T, - Apart from mointoring Tempertures, what else would I miss out on ? Or is SMART not relevant if I am going to use this as a purely backup HDD.
Any advice appreciated. Thanks