External Drives: Is Firewire worth the extra?

rpstewart · 29 Jan 2008 at 21:40

Minstadave said:
The reason its slow is because the drives write a lot slower than they read.

There is a difference between the read and write speeds of a drive but it's not that much. Disk to disk copying like chrisss is doing should be faster than 20MB/s

chrissss · 29 Jan 2008 at 22:40

well a 700mb file is 10 seconds. a 2.4gig file is 35 seconds. both 70mb/sec

I think its because my pc is doing other stuff, and thats why it slows down the larger transfers. thanks for help though.

Chandler_90 · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:26

I now have the choice between ->

Western Digital My Book 2 Home Edition 320GB - USB 2.0 / Firewire 400 & eSata Hard drive

and

Lacie d2 Quadra 320GB External Hard Drive FW400/800 & eSata.

In favour of the Lacie atm.. Should I go for it.

I don't need a massive HDD as I'm only backing up music and documents atm!
Looks like I'm gonna have to get a esata card.. most of which are PCI express.. therefore I have one final question...

Minstadave · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:43

Whats your budget?

Chandler_90 · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:45

Is this a PCI Express slot?
Would it be suitable for a PCI Express eSata expansion card?

Chandler_90 · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:46

Minstadave said:
Whats your budget?

Less than £100 to get it up and running.
As I say.. only 250 - 300GB is required..

So far looking at a deal of £100 for the 320GB Lacie Quadro and a eSata expansion card..

Chandler_90 · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:47

Altho.. that Seagate u mention above could be a possibility!

Minstadave · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:52

Chandler_90 said:
Altho.. that Seagate u mention above could be a possibility!

Indeed its much cheaper, and uses a standard PCI card rather than a PCI express card I think.

rpstewart · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:54

Chandler_90 said:
Is this a PCI Express slot?
Would it be suitable for a PCI Express eSata expansion card?

The right hand four slots are all PCIe. The one nearest the CPU is a 4x slot, the two longer ones are 16x and the small one in the middle is a 1x slot.

PCIe cards will fit in any slot larger than the card, ie a 1x card will fit in anything, a 4x card will fit in a 4x or 16x slot. For plain (non RAID) eSATA, 1x is quite sufficient.

Chandler_90 · 30 Jan 2008 at 18:54

I've just seen OCUK have the 320GB WD in..
My god my heed is gonna implode lol.

Thanks for all the help guys.. Gonna stop spamming for help now!
Shall let u know what I choose

Tomsk · 30 Jan 2008 at 21:15

How about one of these - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-077-LC&groupid=595&catid=671&subcat= - ? Or the B-grade one at £5 less.

I have one of these (in addition to my Maxtor - another OcUK clearance item

) which I use for backups.

snow patrol · 30 Jan 2008 at 21:45

i have all my HD (much of it 1080p stuff) on an external usb 2 drive and it's perfectly smooth..

Minstadave · 30 Jan 2008 at 21:51

Tomsk said:
How about one of these - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-077-LC&groupid=595&catid=671&subcat= - ? Or the B-grade one at £5 less.

I have one of these (in addition to my Maxtor - another OcUK clearance item ) which I use for backups.

For a few quid more you can have an eSATA drive with the eSATA card, I've got the Lacie, but find 25MB/s annoyingly slow when it has a pretty fast Samsung 500GB drive in it.

Tomsk · 30 Jan 2008 at 22:05

Minstadave said:
For a few quid more you can have an eSATA drive with the eSATA card, I've got the Lacie, but find 25MB/s annoyingly slow when it has a pretty fast Samsung 500GB drive in it.

My backups are scheduled automatically to be done when I'm not using my PC, so the speed isn't really a problem.

rocketman · 30 Jan 2008 at 22:34

Using a lacie pci-e esata card, an Icy Dock MB559US-1S enclosure and a WD AAKS drive, I regularly hit 74MB/s

Would never go back to USB2 now!

Minstadave · 30 Jan 2008 at 22:44

rocketman said:
Using a lacie pci-e esata card, an Icy Dock MB559US-1S enclosure and a WD AAKS drive, I regularly hit 74MB/s Would never go back to USB2 now!

Yeah 3x the speed is pretty nice, even just for the odd steam backup (which can get pretty massive, think mine is 13GBs at the moment).

Chandler_90 · 1 Feb 2008 at 14:14

I went for ->

A 320GB MyBook Home (Firewire 400/USB2 and eSata) &
A PCI (non express) eSata expansion card.

Cost about £120 for the lot.
Not too bad..

Minstadave · 1 Feb 2008 at 18:22

But the 500GB Seagate with the card is just over half that price :confused:

Chandler_90 · 1 Feb 2008 at 18:57

Minstadave said:
But the 500GB Seagate with the card is just over half that price

I'm gonna admit somethng here...
I went for the WD drive because I liked the way it looked..
The seagate just didn't look nice to me at all...

Pretty shallow if I'm honest...

Minstadave · 1 Feb 2008 at 19:04

No worries mate

As long as you're happy with it