External Firewire HDD?

Mint_Sauce · 27 Aug 2007 at 18:00

I'm looking for some way to have really fast hard drives attached to my laptop. I rely on a piece of software which needs fast hard drives to operate well and my laptop 5400 just isn't cutting it.

I was thinking maybe there's a raid external firewire solution available but after doing a search didn't really come up with much.

I'm looking for suggestions on what I could use to get really fast hdd speeds, it's mostly for temp storage while the software processes huge image files so smaller hard drives would be ok, say no lower than 40gb each though.

enigmo · 28 Aug 2007 at 23:20

While you are right in that a firewire drive would be better for transporting around large files than a USB2 connection, neither of them are particularly fast. Read speeds may well be comparable between FireWire and IDE, but write speeds may take a hit. Also, is it a FireWire400 or 800 socket you've got on your laptop? If 800, it may well be worth it as it should in theory be faster than your IDE interface, but if only 400 it will be a bottleneck and restrict you to 35MB/sec max. It may well be more worthwhile to replace your current internal drive with a 7200rpm drive, or bite the bullet and use a desktop.

Mint_Sauce · 1 Sep 2007 at 23:07

Thanks enigmo, I think i've decided to just go the desktop route with some raid business going on. I think all the faffing about with my laptop will end up costing more for less performance. Will use the laptop as a second machine.

Cheers!!

ByteJuggler · 2 Sep 2007 at 03:04

Umm dude. Get a PCMCIA (preferably PCMCIA Express if your laptop supports it) SATA adapter/card for your laptop, with an external e-Sata disk. Et voila. Desktop disk performance on your laption

BigglesPiP · 2 Sep 2007 at 03:22

eSATA express card, plus eSATA external hard drive.

Gives the performance of an internal drive.