Real-world difference between copying using these methods

OCdude

OCdude

OCdude

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I'm tempted to replace my ancient PC with a netbook for the time being, which means i'll have to access my old ATA133 drives via my USB2 caddies.

I know the 'theoretical' limits of the 2 buses (133MB/s for ATA133 and 60MB/s for USB2).

But realistically, am i going to want to chop my own face off when i see the speed difference when i'm copying large files onto the drives via USB2?
 
How large is large? If I recall correctly, I copied about 30-40GB via USB in around 30 minutes.

For day-to-day 1GB or under file copying I'd say it's perfectly acceptable - not too much waiting time at all.
 
IF you could get eSATA to work successfully you would see ~3x the speed of USB2, and a similar transfer speed to an internal drive. Even if your laptop doesn't have built-in eSATA you can buy an ExpressCard to provide it (I have an inexpensive Trust eSATA card for my HP laptop). Problem is that eSATA is so **** flakey that success is not guaranteed. Other than that you're looking at 20-25Mbsec max, and possibly much less (5Mbsec if transferring lots of small files rather than 1 big one).
 
It's the enclosure's interface that supplies the connection capability, not all do but some offer eSATA and also accept both SATA and IDE drives.
 
If the drives are very old their performance is propably under 60MB/sec anyway which means that USB2 should be fast enough to max the drives, but CPU usage will be higher with USB2.
 
Most netbooks have fairly small drives and depending on the drive the write performance may not keep up with USB2.

USB2 is fairly fast, 1GB should take around half a minute depending if it's one big file or lots of smaller ones.

It's not instant but it's 12x faster than the maximum download speed on an Virgin 20mbit connection I doubt you'll care too much.

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I'm currently faced with moving 139GB of disk ISOs from one USB2 drive to another USB2 drive, both connected to the same host. Job is proceding at 8.9MB/sec and will take about 4 *** hours. USB2 is not for TB size drives...
 
why exactly do you need to access stuff from old hdd's onto your netbook? How exactly "ancient" is the computer you're replacing because Atom cpu's, are absolute and utter crap, low power goodness, but anything other than e-mail and its not exactly stellar. But my point is, are you simply saying you want to transfer your e-mails, and some work over, or are you saying you've got 1tb worth of say video on drives you'll want to access now and then on the netbook.

I guess what i'm getting at is, depending on what you're doing with it, a netbook might just be the wrong choice in the first place so a bad idea.

If you're wanting to play video and stuff you current have on your hdd's, just keep the old comp and stream them over a network.

basically the answer you'll get vary's based on what you want to do , how often and why so you'll get a better answer if you can give us an idea.

e-sata is the way to go in general though and theres normally a way to get it working on just about anything.
 
Doesn't matter what the reason is, we don't know his circumstances just the requirement. Maybe he needs something ultra-portable. Whatever, it may not be a fire-breathing crunching machine but (some) NetBooks are not crap, an NC10 for example will play 720p movies but with a 160BG drive storage space is limited.

Another option for the OP might be to replace the existing HD in the NetBook with the largest he can get (500GB I think) and if that's big enough then just transfer the contents of the 'old' IDE drives to that.
 
if you noticed the original post he said "for the time being" so i'm guessing that a larger purchase would be coming in the near future and he's just getting a netbook to keep him going until another system is bought.
This means irrelevant to what he's using the data for on the netbook, the question he needs to know is will using a usb2 caddy be slow.
The answer from my experience will depend on the USB2 controller. as they are not all equal. with an old IDE drive the 133mb/s is its theoretical maximum.. most of the drives never got close to these in practice. USB2 on a good controller will be more than sufficient for copying files under normal use.

I use loads of external drives personally all running through the USB2 bus (as i format/change cased and upgrade a fair bit easier keeping drives for storage out of the system) and for lots of small files usb is perfectly good. for singular large files then youll hit the bus's upper limit but this still wont be "slow"

by definition i mean small files upto 1gb and large over 2-4gb.
I'm guessing as for normal use and due to the size of most netbook hard drives 'OCdude' will only be copying a few movie files and normal documents which are generally under 2gb, for this he wont notice any massive speed issues and definately not slow enough to
quote "chop my own face off" :)

Cheers
ROfu
 
Correct, the netbook is just something cheap(ish) to make do, until i get my proper upgrades later in the year!

As for the data i'll be copying, it'll be large ISOs (legal, of course!) due to the fact that the NC10 doesn't have a DVD drive, nor do I have an external DVD drive.

So yeah, nothing hilariously large, just maybe 5-10GB every couple of weeks.
 
in that case your not gonna notice any issues using the usb2 caddy.. itll be fine - i do the same on my laptop all the time.

Cheers
ROfu
 
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