How slow are external drives?

[geeza]

How slow are thye compaired to normal 7200 drives? I dont want to be sat for hours backing up 50gig or anything. Especially as ill be getting a 500gb

 

[rocketman]

If the drive is a 3.5" then it will be 7200rpm as well. It's how it's connected to your PC that the speed will depend on.

 

[semi-pro waster]

As rocketman says the drives are exactly the same as the internal ones so you could swap it for the one in your current PC and find no performance difference but unless you use USB 2.0, Firewire or eSATA then you will suffer.

 

[Will_3rd]

it will be slower if you use USB 2.0 and Firewire as it will bottleneck the drives.

Something like eSATA would be very fast though.

 

[celliott]

My USB2 external hdd only gets about 33Mb/s transfer rate which is a bit slow. Not too bad just for backups though.

 

[geeza]

Yep usb2 i think. whats eSATA?

im lookin at this one

LaCie Black 500GB USB2.0 External Hard Drive (301285)

500GB Capacity, USB 2.0 Interface, 7200RPM Spin Speed, 16MB Cache, 2 Year Warranty. At just a little over 12p/GB the LaCie Black 500GB USB 2.0 External Drive offers simple and cost effective storage.

Or the WD sata internal one for the same price

will be using for videos, music and maybe games aswell

 

[semi-pro waster]

eSATA is external SATA, it is just a different connection standard that gives you the same sort of speeds as you would have from the internal connection. Some motherboards have the ports but I think it is mainly on newer motherboards.

 

[Five_Star]

I can confirm that even USB 2.0 is slow for external usage. It too ages to backup all my files to a myBook 750GB @ 20MB/s!!

 

[badbob]

External hard drives are much slower than internal (USB and firewire) I also don't trust USB connection, have lost data. I'd use esata, or buy sata removeable cages.

 

[helmutcheese]

Faster than most peeps internals

WD My Book Prem ES 500GB.