Fastest portable storage?

Peerzy

Peerzy

Peerzy

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Joined
9 Nov 2008
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I have a new i7 IB PC and a 2011 Macbook Air (1.8GHz i5, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, SD card reader, USB2, Wifi).

I play Football Manager and would like to play on both machines, the save game file is about 1GB big and there are 10 of them (automatically saves every game week and keeps the previous 9 weeks worth as well).

I basically want the quickest way to be able read/write to a portable storage device that both the PC and Mac will read.

I tried popping the files onto a 16GB Class4 SD card but the load and save game time went from about 15 seconds normally up to about 10-15minutes, can easily do a week in game every 15 minutes so it was unplayable basically.

Tried having the files on my PC and loading them over Wifi but that seemed as slow, although the network was busy.

Ideally the files need to be on a portable drive as I often take the MBA out and want to be able to play on the go when I don't have internet. The MBA doesn't have USB3, only USB2.

The PC has the following connections:

USB2
USB3
Wifi
Ethernet
eSATA

(Motherboard)

The MBA has the following connections;

USB2
Wifi
Thunderbolt
Firewire
SD Card

tl:dr - fastest portable device that would store about 10GB of data and be readable on a PC and MBA.
 
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eSata

I use a Samsung F3 1TB with an eSata dock for regular backups. Full 120mb/s transfer so takes no time at all.

You can get portable drives with an eSata output I think.

..

And then I noticed one device doesn't have eSata, so ignore me :) Unless you can get one with USB and eSata.
 
yes but esata drives need seperate power not something hes going to always have when on the move, plus hes not got esata on the macbook

How often do you leave with your mbp with very sort notice? if not very often leave the files on the pc then whenever you go away just drag the 10gig across your lan, ok over wireless its not going to be speedy but if youve got 10min for a quick copy and past before leaving its not an issue

If that really is slow then your stuck the usb2 throughput and just about any portable drive is going to max that and probably wont be that much quicker than your network transfer
 
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Idleman said:
Can you not just store the files on USB stick?
Click to expand...

Won't that be too slow to read? Off an SD card it changed the load time from 20 seconds to about 13 minutes.

stuie said:
yes but esata drives need seperate power not something hes going to always have when on the move, plus hes not got esata on the macbook

How often do you leave with your mbp with very sort notice? if not very often leave the files on the pc then whenever you go away just drag the 10gig across your lan, ok over wireless its not going to be speedy but if youve got 10min for a quick copy and past before leaving its not an issue

If that really is slow then your stuck the usb2 throughput and just about any portable drive is going to max that and probably wont be that much quicker than your network transfer
Click to expand...

The issue is depending on where I am in the house I may want to play on the PC or MBA. So really I want the files on something portable.
 
Well you're limited by the MBA's USB 2.0. But if you get a USB 3.0 HDD it'll be much quicker on the PC, most USB 3.0 sticks barely saturate USB 2.0 but there may be some fast ones about.

Or you could run a differential sync over the network between both devices, such as rsync.
 
thunderbolt->ethernet adapter and then use a crossover cable for gigabit network between the computers?
 
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